A Sad Sight to See
A few days ago, two of Nintendo‘s North-American offices shut its doors. One was in Redwood City, California – and soon after, the office in Toronto, Ontario followed suit. Roughly 100 employees were laid off from the Redwood facility alone, including the senior vice president of sales and marketing: Nick Chavez.
Ongoing game development efforts are unlikely to be affected by this move. The closures were primarily for marketing departments – so while games can continue their dev cycle as normal, the presence of interesting ads might take a hit.
The intended goal of this move is to consolidate resources a bit, according to a statement from Nintendo of America, and released by Kotaku:
“Nintendo of America headquarters are in Redmond, WA, and Vancouver, BC. We are moving more of our employees and operations into those headquarters and will be closing small satellite offices in Toronto, ON, and Redwood City, CA, over time. Devon Pritchard, Executive Vice President, Business Affairs and Publisher Relations for Nintendo of America (NOA), will assume interim leadership of Sales, Marketing and Communications following the departure of Nick Chavez. Ms. Pritchard will oversee strategy and execution of sales, marketing and communications across the U.S. and Canada.”
According to multiple sources, further attempts to reach out for comment received no answer. There are many reasons why a business like that could shut its doors, but it seems unlikely that we’ll receive a concrete answer as to what exactly went wrong. With any luck, those who lost work should be able to find a job elsewhere – it didn’t seem like anyone left on bad terms (that we know of), and Nintendo’s a pretty big resume booster.