Nintendo raises Japan employees pay by 10% to secure “long-term growth”

Nintendo has decided to raise the base salaries of its employees in Japan by 10%, to combat the rising inflation. This comes soon after the news that the company took a hit during its third quarter, with lower profits and sales than what was expected.

According to a report by Reuters, Nintendo has taken this decision in order to secure its workforce, even reshuffling forecasts and expectations for the rest of the fiscal year. “It’s important for our long-term growth to secure our workforce,” said Nintendo CEO Shuntaro Furukawa during an earnings briefing.

These actions come as an answer to the calls of the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, for local corporations to compensate workers during a difficult economic time. In the past couple of years, living wages and commodity prices have risen steeply, and the Japanese government is seemingly preparing to help its citizens by convincing local businesses to ease things up with higher salaries.

Nintendo is here to stay, even with some trouble

During the same briefing, the company also revealed it had revised its annual software sales forecast down to 205 million units (previously, 210 million). This is also true for the Nintendo Switch console sales, which have been lowered to 18 million units throughout the year (down from 19 million).

With a Nintendo Direct just a few hours away (from the publication of this article), fans are excited to know what’s coming from the house of Mario, Zelda, Metroid and more in the next few months. Recently, there’s been rumors about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom costing $70 dollars instead of the company's traditional $60. The game briefly appeared to be labeled as such this morning, as revealed by user Pixelpar on Twitter, but it was quickly taken down.

Nintendo recently mentioned that they weren’t planning on raising their software or console prices in the near future, but that they were open to doing so if the situation called for it. Whether or not this actually comes true, we’ll have to wait and see.

Source | Reuters, Nintendolife