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A thread on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board asked whether the once-common sentiment of “everyone wants to work at Nintendo” has faded in recent years. Commenters largely agreed that Nintendo remains popular for administrative, general affairs, and legal positions thanks to job stability and high pay, but that anyone aiming to actually develop games would be better off choosing a different company. The discussion then spiraled into a fact-checking battle over claims that Nintendo rarely presents at CEDEC (a major technical conference for game developers), with posters citing actual session titles back and forth — the argument dragged on without either side quite landing a point.
What people said
True.
Is that not the case anymore?
What's wild is this whole thing is literally just this guy's personal "feels like it."
Reminds me of how every studio supposedly wanted to get bought by Microsoft too.
Right?
If you actually want to make games, you'd go to a different company.
But if you want to make games, you're better off at another company.
Of course if you want to develop hardware, Nintendo's your only option — but hardware is machinery, not games.
There's no company besides Nintendo left where you can develop games with any stability.
Foreign-owned studios lay people off in a heartbeat.
And since you can't name a concrete example, this is just made up.
But I doubt many people actually want to join the game development division.
Young people who want to make games today are probably better off at Cygames.
They're technically advanced, open-source some of their tech, and seem like a company with a healthy culture.
I'd love to know why you think Cygames is so great.
That's you talking.
Nintendo barely shows up at CEDEC, right?
From a game creator's perspective, I don't think there's any reason to want to join Nintendo other than the good pay.
Nintendo doesn't present at CEDEC!?
Whoa lol
Come on, don't run away — hurry up with that excuse for Re: #17 lol lol lol
You see this a lot: people so fixated on hating Nintendo that their line of attack keeps flip-flopping between "indies succeeded" and "lacks high quality."
Then again, there's the theory that zero Tokyo-based students actually want to settle down and die in Kyoto.
Same with Toyota, Japan's No. 1 automaker — you end up living in Toyota City.
It comes down to choosing between what you want to do and where you want to live.
If you want to make one, just go make it yourself already, idiot.
These days you can do that as much as you want — if you're not doing it, you never actually wanted to make anything, you loser.
Even at Nintendo, unless you're top-tier elite, you can't get in without a portfolio anyway.
It's less that people aspiring to be creators join — you basically have to already be a creator to get in.
On social media there's this line of "if you want to work at Nintendo, stop playing games and study for Todai instead" — feels like putting the cart before the horse.
Even Kyodai and Todai grads don't get in easily lol
Being good at your job doesn't necessarily correlate with being a Kyodai/Todai grad — plenty of weird ones among them too.
That's just your own delusion, isn't it?
・The 'Secret Exhibition' (Nintendo Museum)
・Mario Kart World
・Donkey Kong Bananza
・Wheelchair Basketball (game)
・Kirby Air Riders
・Metroid Prime 4
・Mario Tennis
・Yoshi
・Star Fox
・Raiders
・A Myriad of Colors (万紫千紅)
Is that just a list of games you personally have a complex about?
That's literally all of them lol lol
Because the talented ones just go indie and release stuff themselves.
Actually I want to ask you the same thing — show me the CEDEC session data.
I've never seen Nintendo's session schedule myself.
What's next, lol
https://cedec.cesa.or.jp/2026/timetable/?list=0
That's just the schedule for the 22nd.
They have sessions on the 23rd and 24th too.
Either way, none of it's actually technical content though.
"Building a World Where Everything Can Be Destroyed in Donkey Kong Bananza — The Voxel Technology Behind the Destruction"
That's about as technical as it gets, though?
Background and key points of this discussion
CEDEC (the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference) is one of Japan’s largest technical conferences for game developers, where companies showcase their development capabilities and recruiting appeal through technical presentations. In the thread, a claim that Nintendo “barely presents” at CEDEC clashed with counterarguments citing actual sessions — including a talk on the voxel technology behind Donkey Kong Bananza — but the disagreement turned out to stem from a simple oversight: one side had only checked the first day’s schedule. It’s also worth noting that what kind of candidate Nintendo looks for varies by job type in new-graduate hiring, and much of the thread’s back-and-forth stayed muddled because it was never clear whether people meant “administrative” roles or “development” roles. As for the premise that “a lot of Todai and Kyodai graduates want to work at Nintendo,” no actual statistics were presented — it should be read with the understanding that it’s based on the original poster’s personal impression.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “The ‘everyone wants to work at Nintendo’ vibe has apparently been destroyed by AI.”
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