Ken Kutaragi was also amazingly successful, and quite honestly for a period longer than Iwata has been and he was fired flat out. What you've done 4 years ago is nice, but it's all about today and tomorrow.

I don't mind this move, BUT I think Nintendo actually needs new voices. Not the same people being moved around. That's just shuffling life boats on the Titanic ... it doesn't actually give you more life boats.

I was never in favor of firing Iwata, but I think it would've done Nintendo a world of good to hire someone who knows the Western market and let them head up NOA, much in the same way that Hiroshi Yamauchi trusted Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa in the 1990s and that led to a lot of good work on NOA's part.

This move ... honestly, I'm not sure if it signals that much of a change. Nintendo's problems generally lie IMO with the Japanese side (despite all the flak Reggie takes, he's just a PR puppet) and importing more of that to the NOA side ... well lets see how it pans out.

Maybe Iwata will now be forced to look at things with a stronger eye on the US/Canada markets because I think too many of Nintendo's decisions these past 4-5 years have been made with Japan in mind.

Nintendo can roll out the red carpet to ink a deal for Monster Hunter to gift wrap the 3DS' success in Japan ... but where's the same attention to detail on the US side? Why isn't Nintendo as engaged in making sure the Wii U or 3DS have that kind of big Western franchise here? Hopefully this forces Nintendo to engage moreso now.

Wow, this is big news. Hopefully this will lead to greater communication and collaboration among the field offices of Nintendo.

This 12x. I watched the launch commercial for the UK today, and it is simply phenomenal compared to the US version. They actually put words on the screen that say it is a new console...imagine that. Nabbing DQ and Monster Hunter was huge, it's too bad they haven't released a brand new MH yet...but it's coming and I really hope it gets localized because it looks awesome. Not only did he give himself a pay-cut....he cut it by 50%, which is unheard of by any standard.

He is the one responsible for turning around the 3DS in Japan and to a large extent. He wasn't directly involved on the Western front, so that is why sales have increased slower. He absolutely knows what he is doing. Yamauchi was running the company into the ground and Iwata came in and the company did a complete 180.

As he listed above, NOA is pretty autonomous...it's the whole purpose of a separate division. If everything had to be run by the President of the company, nothing would ever get done because it would take too long and personal opinions would get in the way. The OS can be slow but it isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be...it's a bit better than the 360 in my experience and that one has been updated several times. I don't know where you are coming from with the online....Miiverse is spectacular, my downloads aren't horrendously slow, and it's whatever server farm they are using that directs to a shoddy mirror that's the problem, not his. 

The third party support isn't nearly as bad as people claim it is either. Nintendo already has more developers on board than developers/Publishers that are confirmed not to be supporting the Wii U. Crytek, Capcom, Ubisoft, TT Games, WB, Square Enix, Criterion, Atlus, Namco Bandai, Sega, Platinum and Indie devs out the ass; versus EA (minus Criterion and required sports games due to the deals they have) Deep Silver, Epic (UE3 support only) and CD Project RED. Until E3 is said and done, we have no idea what else is in store. Six out of the eleven listed are Japanese developers and the only 3 not supporting are Western, I don't think that is a coincidence.

Iwata's presence in the west will most certainly help relations with western developers. It's more likely that he will explain how not pushing super violent, cookie-cutter shooters can actually earn them more money. Nintendo isn't going to start developing GTA Mario  simply because the "Western market wants it". The Western market doesn't even know what it wants. We scream for sequels and reboots and hyper-realism/bleeding edge graphics....but then we don't buy the games because the developer ends up too focused on delivering the experience we said we wanted and not providing a good game. So then studios close and the cycle repeats again. Japan is their bread and butter, and has always been their main source of income....why change that to satisfy a fickle and slowly contracting market?

Japan is actually the contracting market, not the other way around. There is no console market left, it's basically become a country where there's only one viable new platform (the 3DS, which is selling slower than the DS there).

No one is asking for a GTA Mario.

I think it is a fair question though to ask why a game on the scale of say a Halo/Metroid Prime ... something that could be real show piece for the Wii U ... why such a game was not greenlit and made a priority for the Wii U when Cafe kits were first shipping 2 years ago (now).

That's the type of lack of vision that Nintendo really suffers from. They figured people would just eat up another Mario and that was all the work they had to do.

Even 1990s Nintendo understood this and was willing to bank on games like GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and finance things like Eternal Darkness and the Star Wars games. NCL today .... doesn't get it.

So, he's CEO of both Japan and America? I thought he got the boot from Japan.

What happens to Reggie?

Reggie was always the COO, never the CEO.

That's confusing. Reggie is the the boss of NOA?

This is good news. Americans have been getting the short end of the stick as of late, I'm European and even I can see this. Hopefully Iwata can fix this.

Reggie really wasn't in charge of much. He's still in the same position he was in before btw, Reggie's job position has not changed.

To be honest this may not be much more than the fact that Nintendo had some older higher ups retiring from the board and Kiminshi had put in his time in America and wanted to move back to Japan. So they promote him, but with a hole left at NOA, they simply had Iwata step in, since hiring someone completely new may not be what they wanted at this time where there's a lot of uncertainty within the company as is.

Reggie has no power, he wasn't even the CEO, just the COO (which he still is today).

NOA has no power to create games or greenlight projects on their own.

NOA's power was stripped after Yamauchi retired. Before then, he would let Howard Lincoln, Minoru Arakawa and others at NOA do a lot more with autonomy .... things like the discovery of Rare and subsequent development of Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye, and other hits, the idea to create Retro Studios, the Star Wars games Nintendo used to get, NBA Courtside, Ken Griffey Jr., Nintendo Sports, etc. all of that came from NOA in the past.

Today NOA is nothing but a distribution channel and a rather crappy marketing division, and nothing else.

It's not a coincidence that Rare/Factor 5/Silicon Knights/Left Field/etc. were all given the boot and NST was scaled back dramatically over the years also (though it seems now they are finally staffing up again).