Major Shakeup in Nintendo of America Brass?

Last month Game Informer Online was reporting that Nintendo of America's (NoA) marketing and sales team was being moved away from the company headquarters in Redmond. The likely new home cities for staffers were either New York or San Francisco. Either way, it seems as if that choice didn't sit well. GI is now saying that 90% of the folks in those departments have opted not to move, and instead are taking severance packages. Surprisingly, this includes three of NoA's biggest names: Senior Director of Public Relations Beth Llewelyn; Vice President, Marking and Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan; and Senior Vice President, Marketing and Corporate Communications George Harrison. At the moment there is no official confirmation from Nintendo, but if true this would constitute huge change in the message from the company in North America.

Comments

huh

[nomadic]

Weird. I mean, I can see if they were being asked to move to like Dallas or Detroit or something, but why wouldn't you want to move to New York or San Francisco?

Re:huh

[EveryNickIsTaken]

If someone's a Senior VP or Senior Director of Nintendo, then chances are good that they have already made enough money to be able to live off returns from investments. Also, many of them probably have families and kids... if you're asking this question, your family likely never moved when you were a child.

Re:huh

[Dogtanian]

SF
- Earthquakes
- Not sure what else... Commute to work continually held up by:
- Gay pride marches
- Exciting car chases starring Steve McQueen
- Massive cascades of small, brightly-coloured balls

Re:huh

[toolie]

Actually you can live on a relatively modest salary in NYC if you had to. Your home will be smaller and more cramped, and your commute will be longer, but a lot of people think the tradeoffs are worth it.

A lot of people like watching reality TV. A lot of people can't read. What a lot of people do can't even be remotely construed as a good thing.

So...

[maniac/dev/null]

So, where do I mail my resume to? Its-a-me, new hire!

What the hell? Why?

[Spazntwich]

I read the articles and didn't see a reason why they're moving their marketing department away from headquarters.

Marketing seems to me to be one of those departments that would be about as effective regardless of the geographic location of its employees. Is this just a thinly veiled way to lay off a lot of people without making themselves look like the bad guys?

Re:What the hell? Why?

[hibiki_r]

Given how many of their bigwigs are taking their severance packages, I can only think of two plausible scenarios:

-This change was mandated by some crazy executive in Japan without caring about what the US division said. This would probably mean the move will be a complete disaster for Nintendo of America.

-Maybe our good friend Reggie, who used to be head of Marketing, thinks that their marketing and sales department is full of bozos, and did this just because he'd get high attrition rates. On the new cities, he already has new management lined up, so the old figureheads take the severance now instead of just getting fired or demoted later. If this is the case, it could be good or bad: Maybe they really were under-performing.

Your typical option number three, an executive wants to move to a nicer city, and who cares about all his underlings, seems very unlikely given how many executives are leaving.

Veracity?

[MeanderingMind]

I'm wondering about how true this "move" is. You'd think with such high profile people being lost there'd be something, well, official?

I realize Game Informer is a major gaming magazine, but it still seems really odd. "Sources" or no, Harrison and Kaplan are pretty important in the hierarchy of NoA, and I find it really weird that Nintendo would silently move/remove all of these people without announcing anything at all.

Not to mention how little sense it makes to move marketing so far away from headquarters.