Wow, I've never seen so much crazy shit said about one person on GAF in a long time.
Edit: Nintendo needs a business man or woman.
You mean like Reggie? Or Bobby Kotick? Or John Riccitello? Or Youichi Wada? Yeah, I'll PASS on that shit, thanks. And thankfully, it seems shareholders at other game companies have decided to do the same.
Did you not see what "Crazy Ken" did to Sony? Now imagine the same thing happening to Nintendo if Iwata keeps it up.
I'm still blown away that Iwata is being compared to Kutaragi. They're like polar opposites: Kutaragi didn't give a shit about the consumer and Iwata cares too damn much, focusing on the average consumer more than the whole of the industry. That's Iwata's failing, and it's a style he inherited from Yamauchi. It looks like he only just recently snapped out of it.
Nintendo suffered their first loss in decades with Iwata.
That's more dangerous than some Virtual Boy screw up (which was axed fast).
Sony's suffered year-after-year losses, where was Stringer's head on a pike in 2007 onward? And let's not start about Kaz Hirai, the man who until recently called gaming a pillar of Sony's business while sending brand new hardware to languish and die on the marketplace. At least Nintendo acknowledges the Wii U's existence with more than lip service (albeit not by much at the moment)
I've heard this argument before. It's not relevant, and frankly ridiculous. You don't keep a bad CEO around because the damage is done, or because it will take a while to change. You get someone new in place and try to right the ship.
Shareholders vote to keep him, and they're financially invested in Nintendo's future, so if anyone wanted the ship righted, they've had plenty of opportunity.
They absolutely were trying to repeat the Wii Remote. They saw the mass market appeal of tablets and thought the could sell people a convergence of gaming and tablet by putting shit like Tvii and whatever in the OS. The entire thing is trying to appeal to the kind of people who buy Kindles and iPads, the problem is its a shit version of them.
Or they saw that they could add DS-style gameplay to their home console as an OPTION. I've never heard such a strange thing on GAF as more options for play being a bad thing or a regression or whatever people are calling it now.
Upon reflection, my money would be on: there's nothing wrong with Iwata per se, he has always shown every sign of being a smart developer with a good instinct for genuinely interesting ideas. That doesn't make you automatically the world's greatest businessman though. Combine that with him being given the job of digging Nintendo out of the pit they dug for themselves with the N64 - something a lot of fans never saw (and still don't see) because of fond memories of Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time.
Yeah, people are talking up Iwata ruining 3rd-party relations and I go cross-eyed. Sorry folks, that well was poisoned LONG before his time with the N64, which actually has the worst 3rd-party output of any of Nintendo's consoles to date. Nostalgia never strikes harder or obscures the truth more than memories of Nintendo's "glorious" past consoles, like all of the terrible shit game communities said about each one of them didn't exist and everyone held hands and sang songs of the Gamecube's praise, just as they do now.
... I'm exaggerating, of course, but the point remains that revisionist history has made GAF its bitch on numerous occasions and no one seems to care.
A Nintendo console is only good when it's not sold anymore, then it's the best thing EVER, Gamecube and N64's universal praise after the fact is all the proof needed of that. The "glory day" opining in this very thread for Hiroshi Yamauchi, the man that caused all these long-term problems Nintendo still struggles with today, is damning evidence of this, as well.
Iwata could have turned this all around as soon as he stepped in, except doing so would have required the one thing no executive should do: throw the guy who appointed you (in this case, Yamauchi, the guy who still owns a shitload of voting shares) under the bus.
Should only take a week if you go right through and you skip the ones you already played on other platforms. 
