Reggie Fils-Aimé, former Nintendo of America president, has remained fairly on-message and diplomatic in his retirement doing speaker circuits. But he recently had a few…well, not sharp, but certainly carefully chosen words for all the companies conducting mass layoffs lately, referring to this behavior as a “red flag” and encouraging senior developers to use caution when considering working for such companies.
Speaking at NYU in a conversation with professor Joost Van Dreunen, Fils-Aimé touched on a number of subjects, including Nintendo’s decision to stop selling games on Amazon. Toward the end of his time, Fils-Aimé took questions, and heard from an audience member who asked whether he thinks Nintendo is unique in how it treats its employees compared to other companies in the space. Specifically, the questioner pointed out Nintendo’s philosophy of growing and developing employees for the long-term, in contrast to other companies in the space that seem to do the opposite.
Fils-Aimé gave a lengthy, careful answer with some interesting takeaways. He began talking about the culture at Nintendo of growing talent over time, and then brought up a second company to use as an example: Xbox.
“I got to know the folks over at Xbox quite well,” Fils-Aimé said. “Literally, they were next door to us. And I consider Phil Spencer a friend. And I know that for him and his mentality, it was a people-growth type of organization. I think that as an example, with their acquisition of ABK [Activision-Blizzard King], the playbook is pretty clear. You have a publishing part of your company, you’re hiring a company that has a publishing arm, people are gonna lose their jobs.”
“My point of this is, I don’t think that writ large, there are bad leaders or bad managers in this industry. I think quite the opposite. But I do believe that when you’re running a big organization, you need to hold yourself accountable to the decisions you make. And when you’re making decision to reduce your employee base by 5 percent, 10 percent, even more than that, you really have to look hard at yourself in terms of what you’re doing, and as a leader acknowledge that you’ve made a mistake as a part of that process.”
Fils-Aimé is walking quite a tightrope here, simultaneously praising Xbox for what he says is an internal culture of developing employees to be there long term, contrasted with the fact that Xbox has undergone multiple rounds of mass layoffs in recent years, particularly after its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Around 2,000 Xbox employees were let go in January of 2024, reducing the workforce by around 8.6 percent. This was followed by the layoffs of around 650 more individuals later that year, and another major cut in 2025 taking out roughly 10 percent of King, among others. And then, last July, Microsoft conducted a devastating mass layoff of 9,100 jobs total across the entire organization, including cuts at Xbox. So, yeah, Fils-Aimé suggesting a leader needs to acknowledge making a mistake somewhere in the midst of all that is a mild way to put it.
Fils-Aimé concludes with an interesting word of caution to senior developers looking at prospective jobs in the space:
“I think unfortunately, what you’re seeing, and for those seniors out there, look at the track record of any company you interview with. And look at whether they’ve done mass layoffs in the last, you know, four, five, six years. And if they have, that’s probably a red flag. Because what it says is, they’re probably willing to do it again.”
This is significantly more damning, I think, than Fils-Aimé’s earlier comments, because you can probably count on one hand the number of major gaming companies that haven’t done mass layoffs in that amount of time. Nintendo is seemingly one of the few that can brag about not having that particular red flag, but that’s only if you ignore NoA’s decision to put a bunch of contractors out of steady work last year. Given the sheer volume of layoffs the industry has seen lately, those who want to keep working in games probably have to embrace a few red flags if they want work at all.