-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Ever wonder how much Miyamoto and Iwata make?
- Thread starter Oblivion
- Start date
Mael said:
Who says that management shoulders the higher responsibility? Also, I can't think of a better way of luring your best engineers away from engineering than offering them more money in management. This happens all the time in the tech industry.
Equal pay for your best management and your best engineers is healthy. It's the anti-Goldman Sachs.
The S-Word
Member
yea i know...only on neogaf man..what the fuck? :lolMael said:
balladofwindfishes
Member
How exactly does management have more responsibility?
Telling people what to do is a lot easier than actually doing it... it seems a lot of people have bought into the corporate propaganda that's been destroying the human race since the cavemen. And that's a shame that they don't have enough common sense to see past all that. When the saying "life isn't fair" applies to fair wages... we have a big problem.
I know it's a novel concept, but actually paying your "grunts" more money benefits morale and increases the amount of actual work getting done.
Telling people what to do is a lot easier than actually doing it... it seems a lot of people have bought into the corporate propaganda that's been destroying the human race since the cavemen. And that's a shame that they don't have enough common sense to see past all that. When the saying "life isn't fair" applies to fair wages... we have a big problem.
I know it's a novel concept, but actually paying your "grunts" more money benefits morale and increases the amount of actual work getting done.
MikeE21286
Member
seems like a drop in the Nintendo blue-ocean of profits
sixteen-bit
Member
I recall hearing some depressing stuff about Miyamoto's salary like 5 or 6 years ago
balladofwindfishes
Member
How is it depressing if it's pretty clear he's making enough to make him happy?_dementia said:
balladofwindfishes said:
When everything goes to shit who gets the blame? Seriously even if you get to label developpers as managers, there's got to be someone somewhere who has the full knowledge of what the fuck they're doing withthe company money and who'll get the boot if things go to shit.
Heck guess what Miyamoto's job?
Better provide an example showing that you can handle a large project without a manager (and I mean big, nothing with less than 100 people too and in a company environment too since we're in a specific context) or stop spouting nonsense.
the nightman cometh
Member
Datschge said:
That sure is a nice sentiment and in a perfect world maybe, where everyone tries their hardest and is happy even if they make the same amount as someone who doesn't work as hard or as smart as they do. To think that paying Miyamoto a lot less than he is worth helps the corporate climate doesn't make any sense.
Miyamoto is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Nintendo if not more and by paying him significantly less than he is worth tells employess "go ahead work as hard as you can but I hope you like the culture here because our profits are going to be returned our shareholders and are not going to be used to pay the people we employ what they deserve for making the company ridiculously profitable".
balladofwindfishes
Member
The employee when they get laid off because of poor business decisions, while management makes a bonus?Mael said:
The S-Word
Member
because management is in charge of the entire project? piecing it all together shoulders a ton more responsibility than making sure your little part is done. People tend to hate management because they don't do all of the "grunt" work you speak of but that's just how the chain of command goes.balladofwindfishes said:
Your one individual piece of a massive project versus having to bring all of the pieces together isn't more responsibility?
Mael said:
There's nothing Marxist about this idea you numskulls, and no one is saying managers aren't important or needed! :lol
The idea is very simple: not everyone should be paid the same amount of money, but the career path for an engineer and the career path for a manager should yield similar economic benefits. Having your best engineers 'defect' to management on the thought of more money potentially harms innovation which is central to a successful business. What's left to manage when you're not engineering anything of worth?
It's not a hard concept to understand; we've just come to accept a corporate culture that is highly illogical and unbalanced.
The S-Word said:
No, it's not. It's simply a different role. That's why project managers typically don't earn more than engineers. You could argue that the business owners or business directors deserve more money due to more responsibility, and you might be right.
Sohter.Nura
Member
These guys probably received so many other things while growing with the company, no? Stock options, base salaries, performance based bonuses... and off course these people can make investments with their money as well.
All I can tell you is this: Myamoto probably doesn't have to worry about money for the rest of his life
All I can tell you is this: Myamoto probably doesn't have to worry about money for the rest of his life
balladofwindfishes
Member
AND he gets to play Skyward Sword before we all do.Sohter.Nura said:These guys probably received so many other things while growing with the company, no? Stock options, base salaries, performance based bonuses... and off course these people can make investments with their money as well.
All I can tell you is this: Myamoto probably doesn't have to worry about money for the rest of his life
Sohter.Nura
Member
balladofwindfishes said:AND he gets to play Skyward Sword before we all do.
Yeah, I mean, what other kind of compensation would you like, amirite?
Even though from what I understand, Myamoto actually doesn't play that much videogames.
You are thinking purely in terms of money. Think in terms of cooperate climate, try to give everyone the best possible environment for each to achieve the best possible productivity. Reading "Iwata laughs" should make it abundantly clear that this is what Nintendo tries to achieve and/or preserve. Once a company gets there in a sufficient way, money won't matter as much anymore. But greed can easily break such a climate again if it's not applied in a consistent way which everyone in there can consider fair.the nightman cometh said:
Iwata would laugh about this thread since he knows where Nintendo has the real advantages against the competition.
balladofwindfishes
Member
no, he HAS to go where the most money is. Because money makes him happy.Empty said:
he's a total moron for not moving to EA, there's no other reasons he'd ever want to stay at Nintendo with that salary.
when you do it this way, it's kind of fun. 
It is, but you have to realize a large sum of Nintendo's money goes to both shareholders, and the warchest.MikeE21286 said:
Really, Nintendo has so much money saved up, it is going to take something of 'modern era ending' proportions to bring them down. Even they, they may just start making cards again :lol
the nightman cometh said:
Maybe they do like the culture?
All the evidence suggests they do, especially after I compiled this exhaustive top ten of high profile Nintendo exits:
1. Gunpei Yokoi
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7
8.
9.
10.
And that's over 30+ years. Even Masahiro Sakurai never really escaped the pull of low wages and table-tipping.
balladofwindfishes said:
That's badly run businesses.
Management should be fired for bad business decision, keeping the people that put you in deep shit is the best course of action if you want your business to fail.
soldat7 said:
I'm not the one who started saying stupid things.
soldat7 said:
You're presenting this like there's a side of managers and another of engineers :lol.
Someone being a coding monkey shouldn't exactly get the same salary as a junior manager, simply because the junior manager has more responsability.
Generally seenior engineers goes toward managing because they get enough responsability to manage a team.
There's nothing illogical in having your best people moving up the corporate ladder, heck if you don't promote them they'll be poached by the competition anyway (if they don't start a business either).
If innovation is your final goal anyway, you should starve them of funding anyway, spin off a team with very limited resources and give them a deadline. If they're truly that good, they'll find a way (and you've got to be resonable too, 1 man on 5 men project is not exactly a good idea).
Seriously why should someone handling the 10 biggest projects of you company have the same salary as your best engineer who's at most on 1 project at a time?
No.
That is corporate culture being highly illogical and unbalanced.balladofwindfishes said:
MikeE21286
Member
Drkirby said:
That warchest is the first thing I thought of when they rolled out the 3DS lineup and all their other announcements at E3.
It's like they looked over at that mountain next to them and realized it was made of money.
Tim the Wiz
Banned
jay said:
Yeah, this is an important point. That kind of working environment is worth the equivalent weight of a lot of compensation in my book. Also, there is a culture in Japan of less disparity in wages across the company spectrum. However, it should be noted that the net worth of Miyamoto and co. is probably quite significant between stock and bonuses, unless they had a mid-life crisis or something.
MikeE21286 said:
I doubt they depleted their reserves one bit. Quite the opposite, it's probably increasing - even with their massive growth in R&D spending over the past several years.
balladofwindfishes
Member
So people who don't agree with you have to live in a perfect world for their ideas to work yet you admit that real world companies don't practice your ideals?Mael said:
It doesn't matter if the business fails... management already made their money. You know a person can profit from failure right?
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
oddly enough, no--i've always been so busy playing the games and thinking about those, as impressed as i am with these gentlemen's work, i don't think much about how much money they make. they always seem to be genuinely jovial people when they're interviewed or when they have a conference, so i just presume they're compensated adequately and enjoy their jobs and lives.
sometimes i do wonder what lumberjacks make. i think it's a lot!
sometimes i do wonder what lumberjacks make. i think it's a lot!
balladofwindfishes said:
No.
I'm saying this how it works and there's a reason for that.
If people don't want to punish management for their failures, good for them it's the company's money they're wasting anyway.
huh?
a coding monkey is disposable as fuck, you can find them a dime a dozen.
A junior manager usually how the work is done and they're way less common to boot.
Now if people hire bad managers, it's pretty much their problems if they want to waste their money.
balladofwindfishes
Member
beelzebozo said:
As long as they are enjoying their lives, does it really matter what they make?
lumberjacks are not paid a lot for the amount of work they do
The company is just as disposable as a codemonkey.Mael said:
-Make a company
-Make millions in a spiral of failures
-Company crashes, you made millions
-Repeat
Do you not live in the same world I do, where companies rise and fall every single day, yet big business tycoons never seem to ever get poor? It's a system they've created where they can profit from failure.
When the CEO of Enron gets out of jail, do you think he's seriously going to be hurt for money? Is his family hurting for money? Yet he was a bad manager.
bunbun777
Member
Culture, corporate and personal. I was looking up the connections with Shinto and Zelda, since some of you think the fantasy of Miyamoto's low wages correlating to his apparent value must be some kind of fluke, or at least explained through no oversight and great managerial control.
So ask yourself, how much does Miyamoto believe?
-edit --- my father was a 'woodland manager' yes huck it up but he didn't just cut down trees. And he was paid by the land owners proportionately to the job, as in a percentage of the lumber, typically. Like most people, he needed money, but did the work for his love of nature.
Cutting down a 10,000 tree and not damaging the 3 next to it can pay pretty well- being a commercial logger gets you 20.00 an hour or less.
So ask yourself, how much does Miyamoto believe?
-edit --- my father was a 'woodland manager' yes huck it up but he didn't just cut down trees. And he was paid by the land owners proportionately to the job, as in a percentage of the lumber, typically. Like most people, he needed money, but did the work for his love of nature.
Cutting down a 10,000 tree and not damaging the 3 next to it can pay pretty well- being a commercial logger gets you 20.00 an hour or less.
Baron Doggystyle von Woof
Member
GCX said:
I think that's better then giving them more money.
Iwata: "here is a studio with almost unlimited monies, make what you want but make it good"
Sohter.Nura
Member
Furret said:
Yeah, I think Sakura was the only high profile designer dude who left Nintendo, right? And even then, he still keeps working with the company.
When a company goes to shit, how exactly is the management made responsible for that? They are the persons who earned millions, it doesn't matter to them if they get fired, since they have enough money anyway. "Responsibility" implies that they are actually the persons who suffer when their company goes bankrupt, but in reality they are pretty much the only ones who don't have to suffer much. They've earned more money than they need to live, the bank crisis has shown that they are even the ones who oftenly get bonus payments after they got fired or their company went bankrupt. "Responsibility" doesn't make sense when there is no punishment if they fail. Getting fired isn't a punishment after you've already earned millions.Mael said:
Anyway, the management is obviously very important or even most important, but dismissing the other employees of a company is a mistake. Let's look at Nintendo: Iwata is a genius, that's out of the question, and without him Nintendo wouldn't be as successful as it is today. But at the same time Nintendo wouldn't be where it stands today without games like Wii Sports, NSMB, Animal Crossing, Nintendogs etc either. Creativity is Nintendo's door to success, there's no way a great management can achieve the level of success without the creative minds who are making their games.
Remember though that he produces practically every one of Nintendo's biggest franchises. I can't imagine he makes nothing from that, unless the videogame industry is drastically different from the movie one. Also he has the most lax, creativity-driven position out there.
Also this.Datschge said:
beelzebozo
Jealous Bastard
balladofwindfishes said:
i'll bet they're paid in flannel shirts and flapjacks!
Castor Krieg
Banned
wrowa said:
The difference being that it is up to good management to recognise talent and create a good working environment, which is exactly what Iwata has done. Artists, designers, etc. are most of the time terrible managers, which is fine - they do something and they do it very well, no reason to change that.
Some said engineers should be compensated as much as management. Again, engineer looks after his work, manager has to look after 10-15 engineers.
As with great managers (Knost, Iwata, etc.) there come great game designers - you are not going to tell me Kojima, Ken Levine, Cliffy B. earn your average dev salary.
wrowa said:
Hold your horses, not all the failures bring doom to the company that do the project!
Stop acting like managers are lazy people making wonderful engineers slave off their work who reap the benefits and blame the workforce for their failings.
Seriously most managers are probably not in a position to bankrupt their company if they tried (or you're in the VG market, home of some of the worst business models ever).
And again any company crazy enough to pay bonuses to their exec (not even managers here) when they're failing deserve to fail anyway.
huh? and guess where the creative minds are?wrowa said:
And seriously there's no genius at Nintendo, only very competent people.
If there's a genius, it'd probably be Itoi anyway.
The reason they're so successful is BECAUSE they're so business minded, they don't wish to make games simply for the joy of making games (when that happens they pull a Wiimusic).
Look at their most successful products and how they were made.
Wiisports is certainly creative but it's certainly made like your bloated aaa game from big company where the director wish to impose his vision on you. You could argue that their best stuffs is an excellent trigger on people's imagination.