This is a tired one-sided narrative - summing up: "Nintendo lost the West and is d00med here" and "Iwata is insular and conservative" - try something that isn't repeating stereotypical memes based on your unfounded assumptions of Nintendo as a company.
I'll try something else when what I'm currently saying isn't backed by Nintendo's current performance and their likely trajectory moving forward.
The first thing people need to understand about Nintendo is that they are a design company, like Apple. They will have tremendous hits and flops over time, but net-net, they are creating shareholder value - which is why the company has $14 billion in cash and short-term holdings making it the most valuable gaming company in the world.
Running a design company isn't about jumping on trends, it's about fostering a creative culture where people are free to work and create, and then jumping on key products as they are built and figuring out how to get people to buy them. That's a tremendous job. That is why Steve Jobs was respected the way he was. This is why Satoru Iwata is highly respected within Nintendo. These guys are going to make mistakes and they are going to do things that puzzle people (Jobs was famous for closed ecosystems, when everyone else was going open), but their internal teams love them, and they perform and work for him because they admire/respect him - and there is a cult of personality around them. You can't just bring in a mercenary fly-by-night executive looking to cash-in to run these companies. The talent would just get up and leave.
A incorrect summation of a company to better compare them to a flailing Nintendo and make them look better by comparison?
You're only half right here. Nintendo is indeed a design company very much like Apple in that regard. But Apple wouldn't be where it is today if were only a design company. I've said as much in other threads: Steve Jobs was every bit as much of a pitbull CEO as he was a head-in-the-clouds creative. Apple wouldn't be where it is today off the back of good ideas alone. It was Steve Jobs aggressiveness when it came to protecting and promoting their ideas that solidified that success. Tying competitors up in patent litigation. Strategic acquisitions to bolster their own product lines while simultaneously cutting competitors off at the pass.
Constantly aware of what the competition is doing and preparing to answer back. Jobs was also incredibly forward thinking (people balk about closed ecosystems now, but seem to forget that the app store took off at a time when people wanted the "it just works" assurance that Steve was promising with Apple's closed system).
Iwata, in comparison, is not adept at any of these things. A more accurate summation would be that Satoru Iwata is all of Steve Jobs' bark and none of his bite. It's likely why they've initially returned to appealing to gamers with the Wii U. Maintaining the fleeting interest of the casual market was likely a bigger game than Iwata was prepared to play -- what with yearly product refreshes and having to keep your company moving near the speed of light to keep the interest of an audience not devoted to the hobby of gaming being the standard.
That said, Nintendo made a lot of wise choices in the past five years: they locked up Japan, which they feel is their cash cow market now largely abandoned by Sony and with Microsoft non-existent.
They also went on a hiring binge and got talent that was being laid off by other companies, and setup partnerships and joint-development opportunities with companies like Platinum and Mistwalker and Namco Bandai and Tecmo Koei - completely changing the way the majority of the game development community in Japan saw them. This took incredible time and effort frankly. Other than that, Nintendo has expanded Monolithsoft, Retro, and fostered relationships with a dozen smaller studios in Kyoto that are offshoots of employees from Konami, Square, etc.
They've also had to build out an entire OS team and built a social network through a partnership which they are managing internally. Nintendo also had to hire, over the past few years, tons of people in network engineering to bulk up on their core software abilities - unlike Microsoft which had people ready to go on that front. They are still lacking on this front but it's come a very long way and will improve - Sony is evidence of that. Even the Xbox has changed dramatically over the years.
More importantly: scaling up creative staff from say 1000 people to 3000 or more, for a company with such a unique workshop-like culture as Nintendo is really hard. Nintendo has the toughest hiring standards in the industry and have a very strong internal culture, and they are very careful about not ruining that - unlike Silicon Valley ponzi schemes that are trying to get bought in a few years and will hire anyone with a Stanford degree just to appease venture capitalists. Nintendo has had to exert tremendous effort to ensure they hire in a sustainable way where people work together and the culture thrives.
With what abilities they had and opportunities they saw I think they made the right choices.
The thing is, I don't disagree with any of this, nor have I argued any of it. But I do think there's a schism growing within Nintendo in how to approach the modern gaming landscape, and that this schism starts with Iwata; but I don't disregard some of the better recent decisions he's made. The issue that I see facing Nintendo now, regarding the points your brought up, is whether or not Iwata reacted in time. It's going to take Nintendo time, likely years, before we begin to see the results of a lot of this recent growth. But the Wii U is in trouble
now. Not years from now. Years from now will be host to the PS4 and Xbox One in full swing. Years from now will see Google making a more overt push into gaming and home entertainment (with Apple undoubtedly following suit). Years from now will likely be too late. Hell, we know Nintendo's general plan for the Wii U leading into 2014 and already people are rightfully speculating that the jig might be up for the Wii U.
Sure, we can say Nintendo's recent growth will likely benefit the Wii U in its final years and definitely impact the console's successor, but it's not entirely unreasonable to be doubtful here, either. After all, most of this growth has been relegated to Japan, and while that will likely mean increased software output from Nintendo's usual players, it does nothing to address the West, and the fact that Western developers and western gaming culture has become increasingly important to the industry as a whole (whether you like it or not). I question what sort of change we can really see spearheaded by a man who has proven to not really care about the areas where Nintendo needs change the most.
In your world, they would have abandoned a few of the ideas above, and gone to the West where there were two camps: one were non-gaming executives running gaming companies fighting over the same pool of 1000-1200 developers, inflating salaries out of control, and desperate to try and release another shoot-bang game on HD consoles. Another group of people were proclaiming the end of traditional games as Zynga was going public and venture capitalists were dumping millions into Facebook games.
I'm sorry, but this is a fucking ridiculous jump. I never suggested Nintendo jump headfirst into any old fleeting trend. In my world, Nintendo would allow their regional divisions more autonomy to acknowledge and adapt to regional ideals and expectation. In my world NoA would be more like SCEA. In my world Nintendo would run almost exactly like it
used to -- back when NoA actually had a say, and library of titles that were created under its care. A Nintendo where western devs like Rare were able to actually exist, thrive, and fill Nintendo's first party lineup with the variety that it's sorely lacking now. In no way was I suggesting Nintendo become the next fucking Zynga.
EDIT: Accidentally hit post instead of preview, but I really don't have more to add here. The rest of your post sort of drives home the same point - excusing Nintendo's current decisions, referencing how this worked for them in the past, discounting my point with the most ridiculous strawmen possible, and not acknowledging how their current decisions have negatively impacted the company
today.
