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[Amir0x]

An incredibly strong lineup of exclusives for the rest of the year. What system has it beat for exclusives?!

IMO All it needs is a nice price drop and good marketing, it'll do well this holiday.

Well if you consider that PS4 and XBO share a lot of the multiplatform goodness, they're all not terribly far apart from one another. The difference, therefore, is simply Nintendo's superb first party content. It's too Mario and franchise whorey for me personally, and I feel they kind of cheaped out on making the first 3D Mario outing on Wii U distinctive, but it absolutely has a lot of sales potential and a lot of guaranteed fun times ahead.

 

[The_Endgamer]

Nintendo just need to release a Kingdom Hearts-esque JRPG featuring all of their franchises through Monolithsoft.

Advertise the shit out of it and see it roll in dosh.


Bring it.

 

[Vagabundo]

Not bad, but this would've been better:

I didn't realise such a wonderful device existed.

 

[cws]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

Beautiful.

 

[Nibel]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

 

[Interceptor]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

Thank you.

Someone mail this to Pachter & Co.

 

[mapachealocado]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

I like you. I specially liked when you said that Nintendo is a design company. I've always thought that.

 

[marc^o^]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

Citizen_Kane_clap.gif

 

[StevieP]

Great replies -

1. Agreed that there are some great people at NoA such as Adelman who has made giant strides in making Wii U a relevant indie platform (ironically, he came from MSFT). I don't mean to discount everyone there and NoA does have some good people. To add some nuance to my point, I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think summing it into "NCL controls NoA" effectively gets to the organizational issues at NoA which are self-contained problems. I hope that makes more sense? People have a tendency to just characterize it as a one-way thing (Pachter, for example). NoA aren't a bunch of robots - I think they know what they are doing - and I refuse to believe that Reggie just sits around and says "yes Iwata-san" when the Wii U is failing to capture the public's imagination.

2. Agreed that something is better than nothing. I suppose NoA had a lot of mud on its face after Silicon Knights didn't work out, and in particular, the Geist experiment was a failure (but then again, the GC was effectively dead). I'm not privy to the conversations Reggie has with the rest of his team, but here is my assessment: if Reggie came up with a plan to build up NST and put a task force together to execute it along with a plan to target a series of games for exclusivity, my sense is that NCL would listen. The thing is, I just don't think Reggie could really do it. I'm sorry to say it in such a blunt way. Howard Lincoln wanted Tetris and sent people around the world to get it. What would Reggie do if he really believed in a game or wanted an Indie to make an exclusive game with a bigger budget? One explanation is that even NoA was unprepared for the hit the Wii was going to be - and as a result they were occupied with building their organization for core positions. Based on some people I know who worked at NoA - there was even a belief early on that because the Wii was such a smash hit - games like GTA would end up on the Wii - because the userbase would be too big to ignore. Unfortunately that never panned out and by the time they woke up - the development community had moved on.

3. Finally, also agreed that NCL has issues as well. Yamauchi had a very different approach to management than Iwata does. Iwata is a programmer, he is also pretty introverted and thinks about things very differently having worked in software, so his approach tends to be collaborative rather than top-down. But... I think he is learning how to strike a balance. Look, I ADMIRE Hiroshi Yamauchi. He is one of my heroes. I think he is amazing. Totally misunderstood by many people. But in this era of developer scarcity and numerous platforms, he'd be terrible at running NCL. Iwata's Nintendo has a ton of goodwill in the Japanese development community precisely because they have been so open and collaborative with third parties there and even worked with people and funded games to support the broader development community. Being a developer himself, Iwata knows the grind, and speaks the same language as developers. However, Iwata will really mature when he can foster and cultivate the people around him to make the right choices and reward them even if they don't - because that's what is going to make NoA and NoE both become best-in-class. This is different from giving NoA or NoE "power" - it's about finding the right people and motivating them and encouraging them to take risks. That is why I think he has become the CEO of NoA.

4. One last comment: I agree with Shikamaru that Miyamoto has a lot of control at EAD. This can have implications on developer morale at times when there are disagreements. The thing I'll disagree about is Nintendo not having that creative expanse despite EAD's more narrow focus lately. EAD's goal is to make G-rated games that will sell in every geography, from Japan to Europe to Latin America. Miyamoto is great at driving that product vision. However there is a reason why NCL has funded games like The Last Story, Bayonetta 2, Pandora's Tower, etc. Xenoblade was basically a failure in Japan despite its budget, but NCL still doubled down on Monolithsoft. EAD just isn't big enough right now to experiment the way they did - so talent is a huge issue. My sense is that in the next two years, there will be more risk-taking at EAD, and it will happen with Miyamoto's blessings - right now the state of EAD is "all hands on deck" - and it's something that has implications for creative output beyond simply Miyamoto's personal product vision. Hence, I don't think it's just Miyamoto saying "lets make these games" - I think practical reality trumps other things at the moment.

BTW I would pay money to know the real story around Pikmin 3. From Miyamoto's weird description of the game at an annual shareholder's meeting as primarily a graphics upgrade to his U-turn at E3 where he proclaimed it as one of the best games he's ever worked on because of the game play. Either the game really turned around, or he pissed people off and changed his stance. I imagine it would make for a great investigative journalism piece.

Great posts. If only everyone paid as much attention as you around here.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.

where's that gif of Yamauchi turning into Iwata when you need it?

 

[DragonSworne]

It is absolutely amazing how many people defend Iwata as he has pissed any and all momentum and money gained with the Wii and DS and continues to respond to the market's complete rejection of his products by executing the same failed strategies over and over again.

This holiday season is going to be very telling. Iwata is not going to be able to hide behind Wii/DS success for another year. He is going to have to be held accountable for letting the Wii/DS momemtum completely disappear.

And to suggest that Iwata still needs to "grow" into his position is the laughable. He has been President of HAL and CEO Nintendo for 20 years and has had atleast another decade of experience at the management level.

Iwata is just a terrible CEO and completely dropped the ball with how to respond to the Wii and DS success.

 

[IrishNinja]

Iwata is just a terrible CEO and completely dropped the ball with how to respond to the Wii and DS success.

scroll up

 

[Pie and Beans]

I don't think I can take the notion seriously that Nintendo is a "design" company alongside Apple and Steve Jobs comparisons when their hardware is barely a concern for the market at large and its just the old franchise IP's and nostalgia they play on at this point. Theyre more like a Disney that... never bought things like Pixar and Marvel and Star Wars, and just kept and jamming Mickey into everything, making sequels to the same 80's-90's movies over and over with the occasional new one. Tangled was great!

The Wii and Wii Sports movement, yes. That was a thinking outside the box and brand new direction, but thats all been thrown under the bus as of WiiU and of course by letting that momentum die for the backend three years of the Wii's life. They seem to have no such ideas on how to push the WiiU as a new experience however, and similarly with the 3DS. They are stuck in (an old) place right now, and the world is passing them by. Yep, they've got Japan for their handheld biz at the very least, but... well thats not really going to be enough unless shareholders are okay with the company dramatically shrinking its reach.

As for Nintendo's "hiring binge", the absence of having actual NoA and NoE software houses, directors and just general go-getters has resulted in tons of missed opportunities over the years to plug Nintendo's line-up gaps. Just here in the UK you had Bizarre die their death who could have provided Geometry Wars and amazing racers to the lineup, and Eurocom who made the best FPS on the Wii with Goldeneye and some excellent design. Dead, died, scattered to the winds.

Nintendo should have also paid close attention to what Microsoft did with Minecraft by setting up a studio to port and create it themselves because Mojang were understaffed/unwilling. Thats an ace in the hole they clearly could have been enjoying themselves right now with a little forethought, but current Nintendo has none of it. Lock down Japan, then ??????????? for 3-5 years.

Comparisons to the old Nintendo, who was busy buying up tech in the years of the Gamecube that made the Wii possible and I guess the 3DS since that was a longterm goal, what has Iwata been buying into recently for visions of the future?

When I say Iwata needs to be replaced by someone that knows whats going on in the GLOBAL industry, I don't mean someone that comes in and suddenly goes "NINTENDO ON iOS!!!" because that person would also be a faddish idiot with no longterm plan other than short-term profit. Which, ironically, is exactly what the Wii ended up being.

 

[DragonSworne]

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Reads like excuses for a terrible CEO. A man who is reactive to his environment and situation instead of controlling the outcome.

Edit -

Iwata's biggest failure is he thinks too locally. He is placing way too much burden on having NCL solve all the problems without actually coming up with a sound strategy. If he wants to meet the demand, he is going to have to hire 100,000 people. If he is not willing to do that, then he needs to realize that he needs to partner with companies external to Nintendo and Japan. He has not shown a willingness to do either. This is the reason why Nintendo is so slow and will only lag further and further behind with each year and generation.

If other companies can do it, why not Nintendo? Iwata.

 

[Shiggy]

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.

At the same time, they completely killed off their Western studios as they wanted to focus on casual games. At Headstrong Games, they cancelled Knight Wars. The studio worked on some games for 3rd parties and, since then, has seen many layoffs. Now it's pretty much on life support due to Art Academy.
With n-Space they worked on Sphear for Wii, also a hardcore title. It was one of the titles missing in Nintendo's casual lineup, but they decided to abandon the studio.
How about NST? 3DS-only after the cancellation of Project Hammer and various Wii ideas. The studio is pretty much a new one as most left during 2007/2008.
Fuse Games/Silverball Studios had a nice pinball game based on a well-known Nintendo franchise in development for Wii. Dead, just like the studios.
Nintendo's partnership strategy as well as their internal HR strategy in the West is extremely short-sighted, as evidenced by the current and upcoming lack of titles.

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.

As you say, it's debatable how successful they were in building their OS team, especially as the Wii U OS still leaves many points for improvement. Based on the Wii, I'm not too confident that they will add a lot of features. Yet you are right about the development of Miiverse, which certainly is a neat addition for the hardcore Nintendo fan.

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.

The problem simply is that they started way too late and avoided potential opportunities where they could have expanded easily. With all the recent delays, Iwata says that they did not expect HD development take this long and such a long workforce. This is simply bad planning, nothing else. And this is also one of the few areas for which people thing that Iwata lives within his own world - the same holds true for the current profit forecasts.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

Strategic partnerships and buying up studios can work, if Nintendo provides some freedom to the studios. Quite obviously, that's not really the way working together with Nintendo works. That's also why the turnover rate at Retro and NST has been continously high.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Without knowing exactly the way of product approval works at Nintendo, I'd not jump to conclusions. At least for the European markets, such decisions are made in Japan.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

I'm sure there have been a lot more ideas proposed by NoA. But it's well known that NCL keeps most of its development in Japan. I think this is well illustrated by lack of features that have been standard on other platforms (e.g. the account system).

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This was a success of the great marketing team of NoE, they created the incredibly well done campaigns for DS and Wii. I'm not sure how you can attribute that to NCL as marketing really is one of the few things where the local teams have full control. Anyway, with Wii U and 3DS they more or less failed.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

Iwata is finally growing into his role? After 10 years? I'm not sure whether you are serious about it as his decisions and current strategy come off as extremely short-sighted. Instead of building new franchises, he is putting his full focus on Mario and does not even innovate the established franchises as he's done before. Unlike Wii and DS, the 3DS and Wii U do not resonate as well with the markets nor do they create a huge hype. If anything is happen at the moment, it's more like Iwata and NCL did not do a proper market assessment before launching 3DS and Wii U.

2. Agreed that something is better than nothing. I suppose NoA had a lot of mud on its face after Silicon Knights didn't work out, and in particular, the Geist experiment was a failure (but then again, the GC was effectively dead). I'm not privy to the conversations Reggie has with the rest of his team, but here is my assessment: if Reggie came up with a plan to build up NST and put a task force together to execute it along with a plan to target a series of games for exclusivity, my sense is that NCL would listen. The thing is, I just don't think Reggie could really do it. I'm sorry to say it in such a blunt way. Howard Lincoln wanted Tetris and sent people around the world to get it. What would Reggie do if he really believed in a game or wanted an Indie to make an exclusive game with a bigger budget? One explanation is that even NoA was unprepared for the hit the Wii was going to be - and as a result they were occupied with building their organization for core positions. Based on some people I know who worked at NoA - there was even a belief early on that because the Wii was such a smash hit - games like GTA would end up on the Wii - because the userbase would be too big to ignore. Unfortunately that never panned out and by the time they woke up - the development community had moved on.

The Geist experiment was not seen as a failure internally. They worked on a product for Wii afterwards, which was canned when they wanted to focus on titles such as Wii Party, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and Wii Crush.
It was effectively NCL which killed NST when they put them on apps for DSiWare and casual Wii titles, so no, NoA has little to say when it comes to real development. I mean, even the supervisors are from NCL.
And you are right, people believed 3rd parties would jump on board if the Wii was to be come a success. Unfortunately, the Wii audience was completely different from the audience that bought games such as GTA - those people were on PS3/360 as they wanted great graphics, online gaming, and so on. If Nintendo did not think the same, we would have got Project Hammer, Sphear, or Knight Wars.

 

[Verendus]

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They're long posts that say a lot of nothing.

 

[Pie and Beans]

They're long posts that say a lot of nothing.

Ah but they're positive and say leave Iwata alone so they're good and really well thought out sssssshhhhh.

Shiggy's inside stabs speak a lot more about the short sightedness and contraction of modern day Nintendo from the rest of the world.

 

[Tenki]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latter: almost all of these companies failed miserably. Zynga is effectively on life support. There are a few small shops making tremendous money on these platforms, but it's a huge mess. The former? The jury is still out who will survive in the next five or ten years as we move towards real-world games with augmented reality and other types of gaming platforms like the Oculus Rift. Needless to say, few companies outside Activision made money in the last gen, and my bet is, EA might fold in another seven or ten years especially if they don't get to hold onto their exclusive sports licenses. I'll go out on a limb here: I believe EA is going to be nothing but a foot note in the pages of history. Nintendo is 120+ years old. They've seen dozens of EAs come and go over time.

So then, what should Nintendo have done in the West? Throw millions into California-based companies for no reason? Buy up studios only for the talent to leave? Money hat a bunch of games from developers that had no interest in making Wii games? I keep hearing all this talk about "Nintendo and West" - but there aren't a lot of compelling things Nintendo could have done. Building studios takes years, and Nintendo isn't just going to throw millions for another nightmare like Retro to occur which consumed incredible time from NCL and EAD.

As for your tirade about Iwata neutering NoA. NoA has been dead for years. That's the truth. Treehouse is the last good thing about it and that's because Nintendo's core localization team has been together FOREVER and all their kids go to school together - they are incredibly tight and will never leave unless something drastic happens. The rest of NoA? The Wii was such a novel product that many people coasted through, even though they had the ability to really get deep and do some impressive things with their fan community. That's a failure of Reggie and other execs, not Iwata who basically gave them the freedom to do what they wanted and even made a bunch of games like Xenoblade available for them to localize.

Part of the problem is that NoA never got great leadership after two rounds of poaching by Microsoft (once before the Xbox launched, another time right before the Kinect launched and Microsoft started doubling or tripling salaries to bring in Nintendo's marketing people), so this has been troublesome as Iwata does not have a trusted counterpart at NoA with a blood commitment to the company that Yamauchi did in the form of Minoru Arakawa. I honestly think this is why Iwata named himself CEO of NoA was because he wanted to play a more direct role in building executive capacity and ensuring that NoA was in position to succeed. He really needs to move to the US because NoA is playing games of musical chairs. The biggest idea Reggie has proposed has been TVii, and NCL let them do that - Reggie could have proposed any number of things frankly - but this is the best that came to his mind.

The human resource issue in the US partially exists because Nintendo has a unique way of going about hiring people. It doesn't want to hire mercenaries like Peter Moore who will sell their soul for a few bucks and jump company to company (some would argue Moore killed the Dreamcast just to curry favor with Microsoft and he himself said that Microsoft helped arrange his transfer to EA because they saw an opportunity to corner both Nintendo and Sony). Nintendo hires people who are passionate about their products, and are motivated by things beyond money - much like Howard Lincoln and Peter Main were during their tenure at Nintendo. Just consider this: Iwata gets paid $1.2 million bucks a year - Bobby Kotick who doesn't even play games - made over 50x that in a single year.

The other thing I'd like to remind people, is that America isn't the only market important to NCL. Europe is frankly, just as big and just as important to Nintendo, if not more important given some of the shared gaming tastes in Europe. Nintendo spent TONS of money on marketing in Europe going from a has-been to holding the console crown when the Wii came out. NoE does a ton of work behind the scenes that people are not aware of to get Nintendo from constant third place finishes to where they ended up in the Wii days. Do you guys think this just happened magically? We don't hear a lot about how engaged NCL got into Europe - but there are a lot of NCL people that flew back and forth between Japan and Europe during the Wii days to give it the kind of coverage it now has - and this consumed Iwata's time.

This is all my opinion frankly, and I say this more to try and counter this ridiculous and IMHO ethnocentric inertia of "Iwata is a fool, doesn't get the West, and is keeping NoA weak cause Japanese companies are pride LOL lol lol!!111" - but I hope what I say will resonate with some of you - running Nintendo isn't a joke - Iwata is a great executive who is finally growing into his role. Yamauchi made LOTS of mistakes early on and Nintendo lost a ton of money with his ill-advised ventures. But that's the beauty of Nintendo - they really want to grow their executives and give them leeway to make mistakes - Iwata will learn - and when he figures out NoA - I am sure Nintendo will have an amazing core team in both Japan and America.

tl;dr --- There really isn't anyone better than Iwata who has the respect within Nintendo's creative teams, support from shareholders, and an overall desire to see it move forward, that could come in and do the things that an extremely off-beat culture like Nintendo is now doing for the future.

wow /clap

 

[ASIS]

Wow this thread is good. just wanted to say kudos to you guys, one of the better threads in GAF in a long time.

 

[cyberheater]

<huge well thought out post>

A very interesting read. Well thought out and informative.

But the thing is. At the end of the day. I bought a WiiU. And I've got almost no games to play on it. In my opinion. Iwata failed in delivering the WiiU with compelling content on launch day and 6 months after he's still failing.

All that good work he's done before means nothing to me. His continual apologies and 'please understand' falls on deaf ears. It's not like WiiU was made by another company and it's launch was a surprise for Nintendo.

In my opinion. Iwata should have realised that they needed a good 3D Mario at launch and moved heaven and earth to achieve that. Even if it meant working with a good third party studio who are well versed in developing for HD consoles and already possess a robust game engine.

 

[cyberheater]

It is absolutely amazing how many people defend Iwata as he has pissed any and all momentum and money gained with the Wii and DS and continues to respond to the market's complete rejection of his products by executing the same failed strategies over and over again.

This holiday season is going to be very telling. Iwata is not going to be able to hide behind Wii/DS success for another year. He is going to have to be held accountable for letting the Wii/DS momemtum completely disappear.

And to suggest that Iwata still needs to "grow" into his position is the laughable. He has been President of HAL and CEO Nintendo for 20 years and has had atleast another decade of experience at the management level.

Iwata is just a terrible CEO and completely dropped the ball with how to respond to the Wii and DS success.

Yep. I agree with this post. If WiiU doesn't start pulling sizeable numbers this holiday season then Iwata should do the honourable thing and resign.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

I've also been following Iwata for a long time, and I think I can add this to the discussion.

He seems to be a deep thinker in nature. When given a problem, he will collect all available data and analyze it through intense introspection, like one would a riddle or difficult physics question. He will form his own model of the reality governing the situation and continue to test and refine this model in the back of his mind. By the time he feels confident in his model he will have probably arrived at several deep insights, which he will then attempt to act upon, in such a way that combines as many solutions to different problem as possible into one coherent vision.

This is his genius, which we've all seen in action with the introduction of the original DS and Wii, and possibly later projects like Miiverse (I don't know to what extent was his involvement with that) as well as Iwata Asks and Nintendo Direct. But there is also a problem with this mode of operation. The problem is Iwata is only one man, and smart as he may be, can only seriously contemplate on a limited number of issues at any given time. Since he is so deep in his analysis, he can be prone to effective "blindness" to other occurrences around him. This type of thinking also probably makes him less than stellar as a collaborator, and probably too stubborn and rigid at times, because adapting his complex internal models to account for unexpected variables can take a long time.

The biggest issue with this form of thinking reveals itself when one must act quickly to unexpected changes, and there is not enough time to gain deep insight into the nature of what is happening around you. Sometimes these changes aren't even quick, but come at a time when a new internal vision has not sufficiently formed in his mind, leaving Iwata effectively unarmed to deal with it. I believe in cases like this a different mode of operation is required, one which does not come as naturally to Iwata as the long term, analytical approach does.

Certainly this is something he can learn to do, or perhaps even better, find a counterpart within Nintendo's current management structure to complement him in this regard. Also I believe this is something Iwata and Nintendo's upper management are already aware of and working to repair.

 

[royalan]

A very interesting read. Well thought out and informative.

But the thing is. At the end of the day. I bought a WiiU. And I've got almost no games to play on it. In my opinion. Iwata failed in delivering the WiiU with compelling content on launch day and 6 months after he's still failing.

All that good work he's done before means nothing to me. His continual apologies and 'please understand' falls on deaf ears. It's not like WiiU was made by another company and it's launch was a surprise for Nintendo.

In my opinion. Iwata should have realised that they needed a good 3D Mario at launch and moved heaven and earth to achieve that. Even if it meant working with a good third party studio who are well versed in developing for HD consoles and already possess a robust game engine.

I agree with all of this.

I also find it especially odd that emphasis continues to be placed on how much good will Iwata is shoring up with Japanese development houses, and yet Nintendo home consoles continue to miss out on most of the biggest Japanese games (short of the one-off show of support here or there).

I'm not in Japan, so maybe there's a difference when it comes to local titles released for Nintendo hardware there that don't get localized, but it seems to me that the few major titles Nintendo gets from Japanese devs these days are the result of direct efforts Nintendo makes to get those specific titles. But it doesn't really seem to me like this translates to universal, ground-level support from these devs, because the vast majority of their big, AAA experiences still go elsewhere.

So how successful has Iwata really been at this? This question is only part snark.

Certainly this is something he can learn to do, or perhaps even better, find a counterpart within Nintendo's current management structure to complement him in this regard. Also I believe this is something Iwata and Nintendo's upper management are already aware of and working to repair.

And what makes you think that? Iwata making himself CEO of NoA instead of taking that opportunity to do exactly what you suggest and empower someone else with different ideals to compliment his own?

 

[royalan]

*Double post

 

[F#A#Oo]

I can't believe people are actually advocating for Nintendo to give 2nd party studios or new studios more freedom. lol

You should look into the history of when Nintendo did give them freedom how these studio's botched up their projects.

Retro, Left field, Silicon Knights etc

You cannot mention Project Hammer as a serious game that a Nintendo studio should make and release. It was a turd, Nintendo bankrolled that waaaay too far.

Just remember how many studios suffer or die after leaving the Nintendo umbrella. It's a sign of how significant Nintendo input is.

 

[IrishNinja]

They're long posts that say a lot of nothing.

all things appear that way, when you don't read them.

Ah but they're positive and say leave Iwata alone so they're good and really well thought out sssssshhhhh.

...which is still a far cry better than this mess

it's cool to see Shiggy and others continue an intelligent discussion around this stuff though

 

[royalan]

all things appear that way, when you don't read them.



...which is still a far cry better than this mess

it's cool to see Shiggy and others continue an intelligent discussion around this stuff though

Who's trolling?

Do you have something to add to the discussion?

 

[ASIS]

A very interesting read. Well thought out and informative.

But the thing is. At the end of the day. I bought a WiiU. And I've got almost no games to play on it. In my opinion. Iwata failed in delivering the WiiU with compelling content on launch day and 6 months after he's still failing.

All that good work he's done before means nothing to me. His continual apologies and 'please understand' falls on deaf ears. It's not like WiiU was made by another company and it's launch was a surprise for Nintendo.

In my opinion. Iwata should have realised that they needed a good 3D Mario at launch and moved heaven and earth to achieve that. Even if it meant working with a good third party studio who are well versed in developing for HD consoles and already possess a robust game engine.

What you said is true, but Nintendo's 2013 line up is probably the best line up they came up with in years though, if not generations.

 

[Tobor]

What you said is true, but Nintendo's 2013 line up is probably the best line up they came up with in years though, if not generations.

It's demographically one sided and does nothing to address Nintendo's long term problems, but other than that...it's great!

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

And what makes you think that? Iwata making himself CEO of NoA instead of taking that opportunity to do exactly what you suggest and empower someone else with different ideals to compliment his own?

How do you know this isn't happening as well? Certainly if he is going to be more involved with NoA there will be less time for him to do the things he previously did at NCL. I imagine someone/s are already hard at work filling that void.

edit: But I do agree that Iwata's ability to adapt (and as a result, Nintendo's ability to adapt under his leadership) hinge on finding a suitable match and collaborator.

 

[ASIS]

It's demographically one sided and does nothing to address Nintendo's long term problems, but other than that...it's great!

That's also true, but I'm a bit confused, what exactly do you mean by long term problems?

 

[IrishNinja]

Who's trolling?

Do you have something to add to the discussion?

probably the posts i quoted? no idea why you decided to take it personal, i've replied to you several times in this thread and while i don't agree with the bulk of your points, never once said they lacked merit or called you trolling. drive-by one-liners that ignore the continuity of a 6 page thread strike me as trolling.

to your latter line: yes, likely the posts i've been making here thus far

It's demographically one sided and does nothing to address Nintendo's long term problems, but other than that...it's great!

i mean, i don't even know what this one's about..."demographically one sided games that don't address a company's long-term problems"...nebulous enough to sound like there's a point deep within though

 

[cyberheater]

It's demographically one sided and does nothing to address Nintendo's long term problems, but other than that...it's great!

Interesting use of words. What do you actually mean?

 

[SenatorBot]

NIntendo used to be the market leader a few years ago with the Wii and DS. They were undoubtedly the visionaries and the company with the most insight into what people wanted and the consumers loved them for with.

However despite having this advantage, Nintendo failed to capitalize on it and didn't take the necessary steps to keep producing the software that the audience they captured on the Wii and DS . If Nintendo couldn't rise in power during the time and grow with their new captured audiences, how would they be able to do it with the Wii U or 3DS when they are starting from scratch again.

The way I see it, Nintendo can be most compared to Nokia or RIM at the moment. They're off in their own bubble and too short sighted to see what's happening in the industry around them and despite having the ability and power to change and become far more successful than anyone else, they chose not to. All it takes is a few insightful individuals to bring Nintendo back, until then I hope it's not too late when that happens.

 

[NotLiquid]

Interesting use of words. What do you actually mean?

Pretty sure he means that only Nintendo fans will be interested in it and there's nothing really new there to capture a different audience, let alone something that justifies the pad which may or may not be a detriment to the consumer.

 

[Poltergust]

NIntendo used to be the market leader a few years ago with the Wii and DS. They were undoubtedly the visionaries and the company with the most insight into what people wanted and the consumers loved them for with.

However despite having this advantage, Nintendo failed to capitalize on it and didn't take the necessary steps to keep producing the software that the audience they captured on the Wii and DS . If Nintendo couldn't rise in power during the time and grow with their new captured audiences, how would they be able to do it with the Wii U or 3DS when they are starting from scratch again.

The way I see it, Nintendo can be most compared to Nokia or RIM at the moment. They're off in their own bubble and too short sighted to see what's happening in the industry around them and despite having the ability and power to change and become far more successful than anyone else, they chose not to. All it takes is a few insightful individuals to bring Nintendo back, until then I hope it's not too late when that happens.

Nokia? You mean the guys who made the N-Gage? Um...

 

[schuelma]

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.
.

Thanks for the post- not sure I agree with all of it, but very well done.

I do have a question/comment on your point about Japan. I think we all concede that Nintendo has really emphasized Japan recently. I also agree with your characterization of "locking up" Japan if you really emphasize the handheld business.

I guess my question is, in light of Nintendo's efforts, both in joint development, in I.P collaborations (SMTxFE), and in the great support 3DS receives, is why Wii U Japanese 3rd party support isso awful? Last year around this time, I assumed that Nintendo would be able to secure at least decent Japanese support for Wii U- based on those relationships you reference. But a year later, and the 3rd party Japanese lineup is almost non existent, and is frankly significantly worse than the West.

Is this a failure of Iwata to leverage those partnerships into other support? Is Nintendo not being aggressive enough with these companies?

I think a lot of Wii U's struggles were easy to see coming in retrospect (though I certainly did not!), but the one aspect I still do not get is why Japanese support is so bloody awful.

 

[gemoran4]

it was silly thinking he was going to. I think that was more people hoping it would happen then actually what his statements were implying.


That being said, while I agree with a lot of Iwata's philsophies, i also disagree in others. I guess to explain briefly, I like what he has in mind when it comes to games and what they should be about, but I think his complete indifference regarding the things the industry and his competitors introduce (especially with a lot of the good ideas his competitors do have) i think is causing him more harm than good, imo.

I also want Nintendo to push more new AAA IPs, but that's another discussion

 

[shinra-bansho]

I'm sorry but I read that long post and I see a lofty and frankly unwarranted comparison to Apple (as most comparisons to Apple tend to be), a laundry list of apologetics for the state of Nintendo's HD development, defeatism that there's no viable way in which Nintendo should be a Western-centric company, or at least globally focused company, in an era in which game development and the industry is increasingly Western-dominated and globally focused, how it was wise to focus on Japan as it's global relevance diminishes, a conspiracy theory around Peter Moore and high praise for Nintendo as apparently the only company with executives that care about gaming, and statements about how Europe are important to NCL as the Wii U flounders worse there than in any other market, despite doing terribly in other markets.

But far be it from me to interrupt the string of "I'm incapable of or too lazy to put together my own arguments, so I'll just quote agree." posts.

Clearly so many wise decisions have led to having a system that sells 8K a week in the US market.

 

[Tobor]

That's also true, but I'm a bit confused, what exactly do you mean by long term problems?

They are completely dependent on their loyal fanbase and children, both of which will continue to get smaller over time. The children are increasingly satisfied with other options, and as such don't grow up to be the new loyal fanbase.

A company with a shrinking addressable userbase has a serious long term problem.

 

[DragonSworne]

Interesting use of words. What do you actually mean?

It means that Nintendo's continued focus on casual/kid gamers is becoming more and more risky because that market is now being overcrowded with competition from Mobile and other console manufactors.

They have no long term strategy to address this increased competition in their main market.

 

[Porcile]

NIntendo used to be the market leader a few years ago with the Wii and DS. They were undoubtedly the visionaries and the company with the most insight into what people wanted and the consumers loved them for with.

However despite having this advantage, Nintendo failed to capitalize on it and didn't take the necessary steps to keep producing the software that the audience they captured on the Wii and DS . If Nintendo couldn't rise in power during the time and grow with their new captured audiences, how would they be able to do it with the Wii U or 3DS when they are starting from scratch again.

The way I see it, Nintendo can be most compared to Nokia or RIM at the moment. They're off in their own bubble and too short sighted to see what's happening in the industry around them and despite having the ability and power to change and become far more successful than anyone else, they chose not to. All it takes is a few insightful individuals to bring Nintendo back, until then I hope it's not too late when that happens.

The audience bought New Super Mario Bros, Mario Galaxy, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart, Wii Fit in their millions. Nintendo franchises grew hugely last gen, and continue to grow this gen. See: Fire Emblem, Luigi's Mansion and Animal Crossing. You've no substantial evidence at all of the potential long term success of any of their major games coming out.

How do you even know the company is short-sighted? Unless you have some sort of insider knowledge of how the most secretive gaming company, plans to move forward in the next five years? I'd love to know how you think Sony or Microsoft are any less short-sighted.

 

[schuelma]

I'm sorry but I read that long post and I see a lofty and frankly unwarranted comparison to Apple (as most comparisons to Apple tend to be), a laundry list of apologetics for the state of Nintendo's HD development, defeatism that there's no viable way in which Nintendo should be a Western-centric company, or at least globally focused company, in an era in which game development and the industry is increasingly Western-dominated and globally focused, how it was wise to focus on Japan as it's global relevance diminishes, a conspiracy theory around Peter Moore and high praise for Nintendo as apparently the only company with executives that care about gaming, and statements about how Europe are important to NCL as the Wii U flounders worse there than in any other market, despite doing terribly in other markets.

But far be it from me to interrupt the string of "I'm incapable of or too lazy to put together my own arguments, so I'll just quote agree." posts.

Clearly so many wise decisions have led to having a system that sells 8K a week in the US market.

Yes, a series of pithy one liners and withering sarcasm really adds so much more to the discussion.

 

[Tobor]

It means that Nintendo's continued focus on casual/kid gamers is becoming more and more risky because that market is now being overcrowded with competition from Mobile and other console manufactors.

They have no long term strategy to address this increased competition in their main market.

Exactly right. Thank you.

 

[beril]

Why would you invest resources into a genre/title when your competitors basically have a lock on that segment of the market?

This. The world doesn't need more gritty shooters/cinematic experiences and it certainly doesn't need them from Nintendo, nor does Nintendo need those games. They should make sure to get all the third party cross platform games (which they're admittedly failing at) to have a broad range of software on their platform, but to actively try to compete in those genres themselves doesn't really make much sense.

If one of their teams desperately wants to make a gritty shooter, or if a good partnering opportunity appears, sure go ahead. But creating this type of game solely to compete with the others is just a loosing battle. The people who really care about shooters probably won't really be happiest as a Nintendo only gamer. A new Nintendo IP in a genre they have little experience in and a type of gameplay they seem generally uninterested in is unlikely to steer people away from Halo and Gears. Even if it's a success, that would still be one game every few years against a handful of similar exclusives for the the other platforms every year.

It's in a way similiar to MS attempt to moneyhat JRPGs, Blue Dragon and Star Ocean just was not enough when they could not secure FFXIII in japan (regardless of how shitty that game turned out).

 

[cyberheater]

It means that Nintendo's continued focus on casual/kid gamers is becoming more and more risky because that market is now being overcrowded with competition from Mobile and other console manufactors.

They have no long term strategy to address this increased competition in their main market.

In terms of consoles. He has a point. I don't see anything about WiiU at the moment that is compelling enough to grow the install base. Quite the opposite in fact.

Relative to handhelds. Nintendo have lost that battle to Apple and Android. It's a done deal.

 

[sd28821]

This. The world doesn't need more gritty shooters/cinematic experiences and it certainly doesn't need them from Nintendo, nor does Nintendo need those games. They should make sure to get all the third party cross platform games (which they're admittedly failing at) to have a broad range of software on their platform, but to actively try to compete in those genres themselves doesn't really make much sense.

If one of their teams desperately wants to make a gritty shooter, or if a good partnering opportunity appears, sure go ahead. But creating this type of game solely to compete with the others is just a loosing battle. The people who really care about shooters probably won't really be happiest as a Nintendo only gamer. A new Nintendo IP in a genre they have little experience in and a type of gameplay they seem generally uninterested in is unlikely to steer people away from Halo and Gears. Even if it's a success, that would still be one game every few years against a handful of similar exclusives for the the other platforms every year.

It's in a way similiar to MS attempt to moneyhat JRPGs, Blue Dragon and Star Ocean just was not enough when they could not secure FFXIII in japan (regardless of how shitty that game turned out).

Whilst i would generally agree with this is I think it would be worth a shot just to see what they come up with>

 

[akira28]

good post tehrik

 

[Porcile]

In terms of consoles. He has a point. I don't see anything about WiiU at the moment that is compelling enough to grow the install base. Quite the opposite in fact.

Relative to handhelds. Nintendo have lost that battle to Apple and Android. It's a done deal.

Erm, no. Let's wait until 3DS's life is complete until you make such a hugely speculative comment. Besides, the success of a product is not so black and white as to 'winning' some analyst war.

 

[DragonSworne]

This. The world doesn't need more gritty shooters/cinematic experiences and it certainly doesn't need them from Nintendo, nor does Nintendo need those games. They should make sure to get all the third party cross platform games (which they're admittedly failing at) to have a broad range of software on their platform, but to actively try to compete in those genres themselves doesn't really make much sense..

Same arguement can be used for MS making family/casual friendly games and entering that market with the Kinect. Did the world really need more casual games when Wii, DS, iPhones/iPads are already out? Nope, but it was absolutely the right move for MS because the Kinect skyrocketed their sales.

Nintendo absolutely needs to make those hardcore FPS/Action games and attract that market if they want to sustain their console/handhelds. N64 flourished in the West because of games like Goldeneye, but utlimately got crushed by the PS1 due to the overall balance and quantity of it's library.

As was shown with the Wii, without those core games the console collapses after 3 years. Nintendo has been following their Wii strategy since 2007 and it has completely failed.

The market has moved beyond them. They need to start expanding their target audience.