Nintendo Raises Employee Base Salary by 10% - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 26 June 2026 / 5,296 Views
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa speaking with investors announced the company has raised the base salary for employees by 10 percent as a way to retain talent.
"We maintain salaries at an appropriate level," said Furukawa. "We believe it is important to ensure that compensation remains at an appropriate standard. For example, we have increased pay, including raising base salaries by 10%."
Thanks, MyNintendoNews.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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awesome job! people who work hard should be rewarded.
I concur!!
yep and if you dont goodbye
Nintendo really is better than Sony and Microsoft when it comes to how to treat employees.
The average Sony and MS employee gets paid way more than the average Nintendo employee if we are talking worldwide. Even in Japan PlayStation employees have a higher average wage than Nintendo.
Yes, that's the bait that that Sony lures employees with, but too bad they only use them then discard once completed. Nintendo does not have a high turnover rate because the salaries are more than fair, and they treat their employees well. even if a project doesn't do as expected- there's always opportunity.
Average is not the most reliable statistic TBF as that’ll be skewed up the highest earners (of which Nintendo has very little inequity… at least when compared to American companies). Median would be a more useful statistic if you know it by chance?
The Japanese one is done by a Japanese agency that compares salaries for the equivalent positions, it’s not actually a strict company average.
Where are you seeing “compares salaries for the equivalent positions”?
From what I recall from the SalesNow Methodology.
They do not just take a sample from a company and make an average from it, but workout discrete values for department/position types and use published accounting data on staffing counts to extrapolate into something like a representative sample for the standard workforce in a development environment.
Like the way an election poll uses overall population data to turn the random sample into a representative sample by asking questions about income/gender/race etc.
Could you provide evidence, in other words?
The original data appears to no longer be online, only news stories that cover it, so feel free to believe the data is skewed in whatever way most confirms your biases. Although I would point out that it is a Japanese only survey and would not cover any of the Playstation employees from America, where their headquarters are, and most of their high earners would be, but Nintendo’s entire executive staff would be included.
10% is a good size raise anywhere
As a Nintendo fan and a big supporter of the working class, so to speak; it's always great to see news like this. Unfortunately, when it comes to how they treat and value their employees, every other AAA in the industry does what Nintendon't. They're the only company that still care for their workers.
Sony and Bandai Namco both pay employees more in Japan than Nintendo. Also, from the Insomniac leak we know that the employees of Insomniac assigned to Spider-man 2 got paid a combined $40m in bonuses during its development.
https://powerupgaming.co.uk/2025/07/28/sony-and-bandai-namco-lead-japans-gaming-industry-in-average-salaries/
Sony has closed more studios and made more layoffs in recent memory than we can count, and they are pro replacing people's creativity with AI.
I don't know of anything bad on how Bandai treat their employees, though, so I will leave it at that, good on them too for paying their employees well.
I was afraid when reading the title about "Nintendo raises" but it turns out it's a good news in the world for a change, lol.
Good to see.
Nice to see something positive after all these price increases and layoffs throughout the industry.
If the last time they did this was like 3-4 years ago.... this is just keeping up with inflation.
That is true. But at least they do seem to do this from time to time, without laying off employees. In the current state of the industry a news like this is actually fairly positive.
Well done to Nintendo, meanwhile Microsoft and Sony do the opposites.
Next week Nintendo is gonna sue someone or shut down a site and you people will be calling for boycotts of the company. Microsoft and Sony just went through this at this point the outrage to praise ratio is so frequent I don't know it matters anymore.
Switch2 price increases incomming! But still hads of to nintendo thats how you should reward the people who makw your company LEGENDARY
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Good job Nintendo 👏
Makes me want to go and buy a Nintendo game to show my support for employees... There are some good Prime Day sale on Metroid Prime 4 and its not a key card...
Is there a catch? If not, good on you, Nintendo!
Right? I am not sure of that, but it does seem that Nintendo and Capcom are actually trying to keep their talent.
Pans labyrinth was a fantastic movie!
Yeah, I loved it as well :D
Ok, but what about the long overdue of bringing back Player's Choice/ Nintendo Select? No one should ever pay full price on old 2-4 year old games!! And don't give me that bullshit Nintendo recycled games retained their value excuses
To be fair, Americans feel Japanese wages are poverty.
Yes, and overtime is engrained in their work culture. But seeing how volatile the western industry is , at least a wage is better than no wage at all.
This is one of the few good things i've heard Nintendo has done in years.
