Here's How Much Nintendo's Directors Made This Year

That's because it's the games and the people who play their games is what brings them joy. Not the money.

I wish western companies would pay like this (and put the profit into the company and employees). That is more than enough to live well/extravagant (even after taxes) and reflects compensation for the employee’s work and contributions, not just have money for money’s sake especially when that money could go back into making the company more successful. Any additional compensation should be made as stock options (when possible, as not everyone is publicly traded) as you still get a benefit of when the company does well you do well. IMO.

Money, a lot of money but not too much as other companies.

That's what it looks like when the money is invested in the company and its employees rather than the executives.

This actually doesn’t seem completely unreasonable compared with other companies. Any idea what the ratio of executive pay is to average and lowest paid?

Walking on Iwatas footsteps and reducing their own pay for the sake of the other employees, nice! Of course they are still millionaires receiving millions, but it's nice to see they understand that and use that wealth to their advantage to help the others in the branch. This won't effect them in any way of course, it's a freakin million dollars, but something you almost never see in other companies

Remember when the Wii U didn't sell well and these Nintendo executives gave themselves a paycut? Over here you get a golden parachute, that is a huge pay day, when you don't perform well and get shown the door. It's how the term "failing upwards" is part of American culture. Obviously it's a system many people despise.

Still too much for one person though.

@Orokosaki welcome to capitalism. This is honestly relatively tame compared to how other top position members in the company pay themselves.

To be rich should be a crime

@Aezetz I am going to regret asking this but, why?

Why are the earnings of a Bobby Kotick „too much“ in the opinion of almost everybody here? If the owners of the company think that these people working for them are worth it, then it is their own decision and their own money. I find it hard to determine the value of somebody’s work! The value of Miyamoto‘s work is probably much higher than his earnings: If he would become a freelancer and develop his own games together with some own developers, they would sell like hot cakes and make many more millions of dollars per year for him.

@Aezetz I agree. I, myself, have no aspirations to be rich. Just enough for a humane standard of living, as we all deserve.

This feels like a good culture to have at a large company. Well done Nintendo. It can’t be good for morale when some of the workers earn less in a year than the CEO earns in an hour, as with some companies.

@Ryu_Niiyama Because no one needs even 1,8 million dollars a year let alone the amount many more wildly compensated execs make. People who have that much money have it in amount vastly beyond what they need, despite there being folks who do not have even approaching the amount they need to live a healthy life.

@Aezetz You are rich, if you compare your standard of living to the global standard of living.

@Max_the_German Dude, if you too are in Germany you know that we need to tax folks, that's how you have a healthy society. That's how we have support for those hard on their luck, those with disablities forced to navigate an ableist world, how we make sure people who need medical help get it, all that stuff and more. In the US so much of that doesn't exist and instead just gravitates towards people like Kotick. And the imbalance is unnecessary and on top of that it hurts people. It exists in Germany too, but there are more forces combatting it.

Nobody needs two houses. Nobody needs mountains of money. You can't enjoy it all anyway.

The earth is finite. We only have so much. We have to get better at sharing.

Its funny to imagine anyone in the gaming industry that thinks they deserve more than Miyamoto.

Makes sense honestly. Japanese culture has always been on board with the modest salary thing and I wish more countries COUGHUSACOUGH would practice it

@hymbii6 so I am going to wait on the person I tagged. But I will give you one and only one response.

A person should be fairly compensated for their work and no one has the right to say what someone else needs. You can very much feel that is excessive but people don’t work and constantly develop their skills for free. There is a cost (usually in time and health and debt to gain those skills) that is balanced by compensation. So I certainly don’t think that what many western members of the csuite are paid is fair but I don’t think they should make the same as a person that doesn’t contribute as much either. There is a middle ground that can still make compensation match work and value put in and still put much of the profit back into the company and employees.

The perks imo should be stock options and vacation time. That way you do well when the company does well and you have some work life balance. Also cost of living is atrocious. So many people look at a salary and forget taxes, insurance, living expenses (even normal ones or that people have families/medical…or student loan debt for folks in my age group) and just throw shade/envy/judgement. I make a decent salary and I budget harder now than I did in undergrad because cost of living is such a nightmare.

@Arawn93 In publicly traded companies, C-level compensation (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc.) is not defined by the executives themselves, but by the board of directors, which is above all of them.

A lot of people here don't seem to understand very well how these public companies work

Without Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo wouldn't even be a thing. $1.8m is a lot of money, but his creations are worth billions. It doesn't seem like he minds, though, so good for him.

Lets hope they have been managing their supply lines better and those millions aren’t standing on the backs of children and the impoverished..

@hymbii6,

You will always have people at both ends of the spectrum, but there will be also a lot of people in the middle too, not suggesting any of this is right or wrong though.

@hymbii6 I guess you don't care about how insane government fat cats just soak out enormous salaries and endless pensions from the public for mostly crap work.
How about the universities that charge more and more tuition as the loans go right into their pockets no matter if the student can pay any of it. They already cashed the checks. And now the talk of erasing that debt from the poor students.. ok then claw it back from the bloated universities. Don't they love their students so much that they would work for regular pay?
Corporate greed is unhealthy but government greed is the real cancer.

@eaglebob345
As an aside, what game is your avatars image from

I’m sure he is happy…

@ChakraStomps Here in the UK, Boris Johnson gets £79,936 for being Prime Minister (and another salary for being an MP, but still not ridiculous numbers).

@Max_the_German because no one on gods green earth needs as much money in a lifetime as kotick makes in a year or two, and for him to accept it while so many Americans including those working for his own company are struggling to make ends meet (or even to have basic needs like food and housing) is morally repugnant. The ratio of ceos pay compared their employees has become 100s of times more inequitable than it was a few years ago. The richest people in America wield incredible political power and use it to retain their wealth at a direct cost to the rest of us

We’re talking about the greatest game developer ever here. 1,8 million is very modest for such a person.

This is why I love Nintendo.

@Aezetz To get super rich people probably have committed some form of crime or at the least exploited a bunch of people, which should be a crime, to get there.

⚠️Shigeru JUST ABOUT has enough to fill up⛽️ his car...

Western companies have a thing or two to learn from Nintendo.

@Gofixmeaplate It's from one of the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet trailers. The first trailer, I think.

@Erigen Not the money? They are earning more money every year than I would in several lifetimes.

How much stock do they get with that income?

Even the money Jeff bezos makes is nothing compared to what is returned to investors/banks/traders. That's the weak link in our economic systems, not a handful of executives and celebrities.

Why would people want to know about people earning a million $ + especially atm when there's a cost of living crisis 🤷‍♂️

This is considered modest? Really, I think most of us are borderline homeless if this is modest.

@Krisi you only read the last sentence, didn't you?...

Miyamoto only makes just under $2 million a year?? Wow that’s just bananas!

@Dman10 Found these stats for highest earning videogame company CEOs in 2020:
Robert Antokol (Playtika) – $372 million
Bobby Kotick (Activision Blizzard) – $154.6 million
Andrew Paradise (Skillz) – $103.3 million
Andrew Wilson (EA) – $34.7 million
Frank Gibeau (Zynga) – $32 million
John Riccitiello (Unity) – $22 million
Strauss Zelnick (Take-Two) – $18.1 million
Taek-Jin Kim (NCsoft) – $15.6 million
Min-Liang Tan (Razer) – $10.4 million
Debbie Bestwick (Team17) – $10.2 million

@Max_the_German Because nobody EARNS the kind of money bobby makes. They take it from the bottom employees making them work for ***** pay. And since EVERYONE does this, they have no choice but to take it. Great system