Nintendo

In 2021, Nintendo donated 130 refurbished company laptops along with training from company employees to charity and educational institutions in low-income communities. Nintendo also has a commitment to integrating accessible design. It provides information on its employment of people with disabilities and shows efforts to promote an inclusive working environment. Additionally, the company partners with the non-profit Girls Make Games for summer camps designed to inspire girls to take up careers in the gaming industry.

Nintendo works with the non-profit Digital Schoolhouse to use games to help children learn programming, providing a unique example of the use of technology to inspire basic digital skills development.

As a company with children as a key demographic, Nintendo’s child online safety initiatives rank among the highest of the benchmarked companies. The company’s disclosures include a strong dedication towards child online safety and cooperation with authorities to prevent digital harm to children, education campaigns and built-in parental controls. The company also makes a high-level commitment to cybersecurity and has a dedicated cybersecurity committee.

Nintendo shows support for innovation with its open standards projects. The company includes open source software in some of their products.  

Nintendo has an opportunity to disclose how the economic value it creates is distributed among its stakeholders. In addition, the company can increase disclosure about its existing programmes to enhance digital access, such as report the participation and impact metrics.

Nintendo has opportunities to develop programmes for intermediate and technical skills development, as well as for enhancing school connectivity. In addition, the company’s existing programmes can benefit from increased transparency, for example, through third-party impact assessments.

There is an opportunity for the company to improve disclosure around data privacy by establishing a group privacy policy. Additionally, the company can report information on its security incident response team, information security management certification and the number of data breaches it experiences.

The company can better demonstrate how it practises open innovation, supports the tech start-up ecosystem, collaborates on big data for sustainable development, and follows inclusive and ethical practices in its research and development (R&D) activities. Nintendo can also disclose the number of women that work in its R&D activities.

Nintendo commits to respecting human rights and the ILO core labour rights. It also has a publicly available policy statement that expects its business relationships to commit to respecting the ILO core labour rights. However, the company does not describe its process to identify, assess and address human rights risks in its operations and in its business relationships. Nintendo does have a grievance mechanism for workers to raise human rights concerns and complaints. However, it is unclear if this mechanism is accessible to external stakeholders. Furthermore, it is unclear if workers have the option to remain anonymous when making a complaint.

Nintendo discloses time-bound targets to promote gender equality within the company. Further, Nintendo places an expectation on its business relationships to respect the health and safety of workers. However, it could make this commitment within its own operations. The company also lacks relevant disclosure in relation to living wages, working hours and collective bargaining.

No company policies or commitments related to key ethical business topics – tax, bribery and corruption, and lobbying and political engagement – were found in the public domain. Nintendo could provide evidence of how it ensures ethical business conduct throughout its operations and in its relationships with business partners.