Video game analyst Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX on Twitter) has shared some publicly released data from Nintendo regarding its employees on the Nintendo recruitment page. The statistics are for Japan only, but they give us further insight into employee retention, which according to the stats, is extremely high.
- No of Employees – 2,271
- Avg age – 38.6
- Avg length of employment – 13.5 yrs
- Avg work day – 7hrs, 45mins
- Avg annual salary – $80,000
7 hours & 45 min.. and here I thought Japan workers worked themselves to almost death.
I guess that only applies to Sakurai which makes him more special!
Am also quite surprised. 7:45 hours is very close to my own working conditions (usually around 7:30 hours), which I already consider rare and lucky. I honestly kinda expected these times to get closer towards like 9 or 10 hours a day (with all the prejudices there are regarding Japanese work ethic), but glad to see the average working hours actually seem to be quite fair (assuming these statistics are all true).
Now of course these are just the averages and it’s totally possible there are still a good number of workers having to do like 10 hour days (at least during crunch times) or something like that, but still it seems like the work conditions are actually better than what I expected from a big company.
The amount of stress that Sakurai got was because he was working on two versions of Smash 4. That’s why he was so stressed and also the 3DS and Wii U development kit weren’t so easy as the Switch now
Ok, the insane retention caught my attention. With those numbers that’s more than satisfying, it isn’t a surprise but rather amazing since Nintendo is very well-known for valuing its workers. Nintendo doesn’t hesitate in offering them great deals to keep its hard working employees. I say that’s some dream life. But what about the Employee Statistics from Nintendo of America?
Most of NOA’s non-executive employees are temps. Source- related to the person who had the contract for doing all the hiring.
NOA is mostly a localization and distribution house. Not really the same thing. More like a factory and warehouse than a corporate headquarters.
I bet it looks close to something like this for EA:
No of Employees – 9,300
Avg age – 30
Avg length of employment – 1 yr
Avg work day – 13hrs
Avg annual salary – $40,000 (excluding exec’s)
Damn. I wish I worked at Nintendo.