Japanese studios like Nintendo and Capcom hit 97% staff retention by paying execs less and skipping live-service

Amir Satvat — Tencent's former Business Development Director and the person running ASGC's Games Industry Layoffs Tracker since 2022 — told Edge magazine that Japanese studios including Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami are sitting at staff retention rates of 97 percent or higher, even as the rest of the industry bleeds jobs.

Satvat's tracker puts total video game job losses at around 14,500 for 2026, but he also estimates that 18,000 to 25,000 people are finding new jobs in games every year — which on paper suggests a net positive, even if that's hard to square with headline layoffs like the 1,600 cuts at Xbox in July 2025, with another 1,600 reportedly planned within a year. Japan, he argues, is the outlier skewing the picture. "Japan is a completely different ballgame," he said. "Everyone calls out Nintendo, but you can look at Konami or Capcom — these companies all have staff retention of 97 percent plus." He points to two structural reasons: Japanese studios run smaller, leaner teams, and they pay executives far less — "two or three million dollars, not 30 million." They also largely avoided the live-service arms race and the 500-person mega-blockbuster model that left Western studios exposed when those bets didn't pay off.

This sits in direct tension with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney's recent comments in the same Edge series, where he warned the industry is heading toward the worst crash since the 1980s, driven by AI investment and a contraction in consumer spending. The 1983 crash Sweeney referenced saw home console revenue drop 97 percent by 1985. Satvat's data doesn't necessarily contradict that picture for Western studios — it just highlights that Japanese publishers, by staying disciplined on team size, executive pay, and genre focus, built a buffer that most of their Western counterparts didn't.

The contrast is hard to ignore: while the live-service graveyard is packed with Western-developed titles, Japanese studios have largely stayed out of it, with rare exceptions like PlatinumGames' Babylon's Fall. Whether Western publishers take any of this as a lesson going forward remains to be seen.