Nintendo has just published its annual report for the FY ended 31st March 2023, and it shows just how much money some of the company’s biggest names take home each year.
The listing accounts for five of Nintendo’s top earners, with president Shuntaro Furukawa at the top (as you might expect) followed by Shigeru Miyamoto, Shinya Takahashi, Satoru Shibata and Ko Shiota. Following the success of the Switch and developments in Nintendo’s movie and theme park reach, you might expect these directors to be taking home unfathomably huge salaries, but the reality is quite different.
The report lists the five salaries in yen, so here’s how it all adds up in USD (converted using Forbes Advisor):
- Shuntaro Furukawa: $2.51m
- Shigeru Miyamoto: $2.02m
- Shinya Takahashi: $1.61m
- Satoru Shibata: $1.19m
- Ko Shiota: $910,000
To be clear, we wouldn’t say no to a $2.5m annual salary — heck, it’s still a lot of money — but these numbers are a drop in the ocean compared to what some of the other industry execs are reportedly earning.
Remember, a report published in 2022 by market intelligence firm Games One found that the highest-earning gaming CEOs were getting almost 100x the amount received by the Nintendo directors in compensation in 2020, with Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Koltick near the top of the list with $154m and EA’s Andrew Wilson with $34.7m.
This was lower for Japanese companies (Square Enix’s Yosuke Matsuda received just over $4m in 2020 while SEGA’s then-CEO Hajime Satomi got around $3m), but it certainly highlights that Nintendo has a different way of doing things.
The annual report also provides an updated list of the members of the board of directors, notes Nintendo’s continued investment in companies such as Square Enix and Konami, and expresses how the company is still researching cloud computing. You can check out all 95 pages of it here.
What do you make of this report? Let us know in the comments.