Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.
This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.
Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.
If you use your employees until they’re not usable and replace them with young, then it’s normal you have young employees.
So layoffs are bad, but not doing layoffs is bad too?
Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.
This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.
Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.