Harrison, Kaplan And Llewelyn All Departing Nintendo Of America
ow that the June deadline date for Nintendo of America staff has reared its head, the fallout from Nintendo's Sales and Marketing move has been leaked. According to our sources, approximately 90% of the Nintendo of America Sales …
Context & Ripple Effects
The departures land at an odd moment: Nintendo's Wii is winning the console race, with Fortune reporting in late May 2007 that the machine had beaten the pants off Sony and Microsoft, a U.S. target of up to 35 million consoles, and a rising share price behind it. Against that backdrop, Nintendo of America's Sales and Marketing organization is being relocated under a hard June deadline.
Per Game Informer's sources, roughly 90% of the Sales and Marketing staff are caught in the fallout — a figure reported as rumor, not confirmation — while the exits of Harrison, Kaplan and Llewelyn are confirmed.
First-order effects
- Nintendo of America loses three of its most visible sales-and-marketing leaders at once, exactly when execution on the Wii's 35-million-unit U.S. push matters most.
- If the reported 90% attrition among Sales and Marketing staff proves accurate, the subsidiary faces a near-total rebuild of the team responsible for its biggest commercial win.
Second-order effects
- With its marketing bench thinning mid-cycle, Nintendo of America's retail and advertising push against Sony and Microsoft — already framed by analysts as an Atari-versus-Betamax-style contest — depends on whoever fills the vacated roles.
- Rivals gain a hiring pool: departing Nintendo marketing veterans are obvious targets for Sony and Microsoft's own console campaigns.
Third-order effects
- If relocation deadlines become the mechanism for reshaping a regional subsidiary, Nintendo of America's structure points toward a leaner head office whose autonomy is set by headquarters rather than by local leadership.
- The episode illustrates a recurring industry tension: platform holders restructuring regional operations even at the peak of commercial success, treating organizational control as separable from product momentum.
The trend: Console manufacturers are consolidating regional sales and marketing operations through forced relocations and executive turnover even while their hardware cycles dominate the market.