FromSoftware raises base salary for graduates in Japan by 11 percent

Elden Ring and Dark Souls developer FromSoftware is raising its base salary in Japan. From April 2025, it will pay new graduates 300,000 yen ($2,020)–an 11.8 percent increase from its current starting salary of 260,000 yen ($1,750).

The raise comes amid a wider move in Japan to attract and retain top tier developer talent. Over the last 12 months, Konami, Capcom and Atlus have all increased their starting salary to 300,000 yen, bringing the Dark Souls creators’ graduate pay structure inline with its Japanese peers.

Capcom and Atlus raised their starting salaries by 27 percent and 15 percent respectively to reach the same 300,000 yen figure, with FromSoftware previously paying graduates the highest wage of the three Japanese publishers.

The salary bump comes amid a good year for FromSoftware, with the critically acclaimed Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree expansion shifting five million copies in its first three days.

As games studios in the West shutter and publishers continue to announce mass layoffs, Japanese-owned studios thus far, have been largely immune. FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has stated that mass layoffs won’t happen at his studio “as long as this company is my responsibility”.

Japan’s thriving game industry

With the PC gaming market in Japan almost tripling since 2019 (via Serkan Toto) and mobile gaming bigger than ever in the region, the Japanese games industry continues to be the thriving anomaly during a global slump. It’s a phenomenon chalked up in part to Japan’s strict employment laws and the Japanese language’s lack of ubiquity.

“Japan is an island nation where the language is only spoken inside the country and nowhere else–you can’t sack 500 Japanese people and then outsource that work to 500 people in the Philippines,” industry analyst Serkan Toto told GamesIndustry.biz earlier this year.

“The population in Japan is graying and shrinking at the same time, you have less talent. Companies like Bandai Namco, Nintendo, and Capcom are not paying people more because they want to share the wealth, they do it because they have no other choice! Otherwise, these software engineers working at Capcom might go and work for Toyota in the AI business.”