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Nintendo of Korea laid off almost 80% of its employees.

catmario

Member
Source: http://www.inven.co.kr/webzine/news/?news=153799

Nintendo of Korea is carrying out a large-scale restructuring by lay off almost 80% of its employees. NoK has laid off almost 50 employees. Only 10 employees will remain in NoK.

And according to source says, NoK will relocate an office to outside of Seoul. Fukuda Hiroyuki will remain as CEO of Nintendo of Korea.

Nintendo of Korea has suffered financial losses for the past four years, so that's why NoK made a massive layoffs to its employees.

NoK has some notable line-ups for Korean market right now like Kirby Robobo planet (Same release date as Japanese), Hyrule Warriors Legends, Fire Emblem if, Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask 3D, and Pokemon Sun/Moon. Most of them will be localized in Korean language. But NoK is still keeping silent on their next plan.

Edit: lol sorry for typo on title. Fix the title to almost please
 
Nintendo's Asian presence other than Japan is non-existent. Region-locking basically killed all their business in China (that's the Chinese speaking region including Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Korea, if you want to play localized games, you have to buy the console released in that region, which in turn is not compatible with any other region's games, and localized games are extremely rare, especially for Chinese markets. There are couple exceptions like some Chinese localized games can be played on Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan 3DS, but again they are rare which makes the whole point moot.
 

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Korea seems like a pretty hard market to crack for dedicated devices. PCs and mobile are just so well entrenched and Nintendo's devices in particular really lack the type of games that succeed in the market.
 

Mariolee

Member
Wow, I feel like we almost never hear of massive Nintendo layoffs. Insane, praying those people land on their feet and find jobs soon.
 

Rhuidan

Neo Member
I think the title sounds very misleading, you could have put 50 employees laid off.

Hope they all find jobs soon.
 

pastrami

Member
80% sounds like alot but 50 employees doesn't sound like much.

But that only leaves 10 employees left. 50 employees fired out of 120 means you still have a fairly significant 70 employees. 10 employees is basically a skeleton crew and signifies how weak Nintendo is in Korea.
 

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
Nirolak said:
Korea seems like a pretty hard market to crack for dedicated devices.
Ironically, they DID corner that market nearly a decade ago, but lost it similar to how Wii lost its own stranglehold in the west. NDS completely dominated hand-held devices(of any kind - not just gaming) in 2006-7 - it was hard to go anywhere in public without seeing people carrying/playing NDSs (it was especially popular with women). I guess this is one time where "fad" is a fitting description, as it virtually disappeared in years after.
Wii launched in Korea late, and expectations were it would replicate the success (with non-stop barrage of TV advertisement I've not seen for any device before) but for some reason it never took the same way DS did.

By now, market climate is dominated by mobile phones similar to Japan, with everything else not doing so well.
 
I wonder if it was Nintendo of Korea who organized Tecmo's Pangya wii games. I dont think we have seen any South Korean Nintendo games outside of that?
 

linid0t

Member
Nintendo's Asian presence other than Japan is non-existent. Region-locking basically killed all their business in China (that's the Chinese speaking region including Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Korea, if you want to play localized games, you have to buy the console released in that region, which in turn is not compatible with any other region's games, and localized games are extremely rare, especially for Chinese markets. There are couple exceptions like some Chinese localized games can be played on Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan 3DS, but again they are rare which makes the whole point moot.

Yeah everyone in HK just buys the USA or JPN region console, especially since now you can just hack it open for region unlock haha
 

crinale

Member
Nintendo's Asian presence other than Japan is non-existent. Region-locking basically killed all their business in China (that's the Chinese speaking region including Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Korea, if you want to play localized games, you have to buy the console released in that region, which in turn is not compatible with any other region's games, and localized games are extremely rare, especially for Chinese markets. There are couple exceptions like some Chinese localized games can be played on Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwan 3DS, but again they are rare which makes the whole point moot.

As for Taiwan they did have some presence indeed till like 7-8 years ago IIRC. However now they have little to no existence in the market.
 

Aters

Member
Fuck region lock.
This is from some one who bought two 3DSs just to play games in different regions.
Meanwhile Sony is trying to translate all the games into Chinese/Korean. As an Asian gamer, there are few reasons to support Nintendo.
 

Vena

Member
They recently dumped their distributor in the Balkan region. Though we didn't much have it as a No(the Balkans) just a middleman distributor which was complete garbage, it was cheaper to buy a ticket to fly back home with hardware and games than it was to buy hardware and games from the distributors. NoE doesn't much serve that region of Europe.

I can only hope that they do as they've been recently doing in some other regions in eastern Europe and find a new distributor and restructure their presence to attempt to be a more meaningful one.

Step one in increasing there presence would be to ax regional locking on both their hardware and storefronts. Its an incredible hassle to jump through the necessary hoops to get my little cousins the hardware to play Pokemon (everyone just pirates it otherwise, and there's still a lot of kids who love the games... they just have no access to it), and this is from a comfortable position of being able to get them anything they want from the US. Anyone actually in the region is going to basically have no access to any of this stuff. They don't even need an increased translation arm, most of the people who'd buy hardware have extended language knowledge.

... though that's true of all hardware, basically.
 

Nightbird

Member
Wow, seems like NoK is standing on its last legs.

Does someone know why Nintendo doesn't try as hard to gain the rest of Asia for itself like Sony does?
 

Vena

Member
Wow, seems like NoK is standing on its last legs.

Does someone know why Nintendo doesn't try as hard to gain the rest of Asia for itself like Sony does?

Company sizes and global positioning. Policies like regional locks do not help, obviously, but the former is a big part of it.

Nintendo needs to take a big step/initiative to get itself back into the global scene in hard-to-crack regions or growth regions. Whether or not they will is yet to be seen.
 
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