Just what was the turning point in nintendos fortunes?

It seems these days Nintendo can do no wrong. They as a comapny have made some of the most remarkable decisions in the past couple of years that have propeled them back to the magical era of the late 80s/early 90s and I was just thinking about some of the things that nintendo have done to acheive this change in fortune.

. The DS
. Nintendogs
. Braintraining
. The DS lite
. The name "wii"
. The wii remote
. E3 2006
. Including wii sport with the wii
. Brilliant PR
. cheap price and no HD

These are some of the decisions/events etc that I think they have made that have paid dividens for the company. Just wondered what everyone else thought and what decisions that sony and microsoft have made that have changed things for the worse/better for them and if all 3 companys should/need/dont need to change

They kept friend codes and as much as I love the Wii hate friend codes more than South Dakota (AKA a lot).

They've been lax at trying to show off surprise new releases... the only real surprises so far have been the balance board...

Also they've forgotten about things like battalion wars wii, disaster:day of crisis... they should be hyping these more =(

After several years of brilliant E3s, their conferences have been pretty boring this year. The Wii's online system is still well... it might be good when it gets here, but so far we have very little to play around with.

The games drought in early/mid 07 was also a bit of a bummer, and Europe constantly getting shafted with release dates is seriously pissing me off.

NAH JUST KIDDING I DIDN'T REALLY WANT THE SEQUEL OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE GAME IN 07, BRAWL 08 FTW!!!!!11

As much as I love Nintendo I am going to have to disagree. They have made some good moves - DS, Wii Sports. Most of the current situation has to do with the other companies screwing up. Nintendo launched its console at the price home consoles should cost. I can't say this enough, jsut look at history and how many over priced consoles bit the dust. Microsoft might have gotten away with being a little more expensive but dumping the first XBox in a super short time frame and the whole RROD problem could have been avoided if they were willing to wait until the generation actually started.

Don't get me wrong they have made no errors in the portable market (They were helped along by no competition for years). Their recent competition has come from a media player which was overpriced and tried to push a new movie format.

What Nintendo has always done is produce innovative fun consoles/games and this time they caught the competition with their pants down.

You forgot a pretty important one: they did all this AGAINST the general gamers opinion.
The opinion was against them all this time, and, guess what, STILL is.
That's what's even more amazing to me.
I recall back in 1991, people already wanted to get women into games. They never really succeeded in a big scale, except the Sims perhaps. When you look at the situation, you understand the videogame industry would never have achieved that without Nintendo. Because the current situation shows that what needed to be done is what Nintendo have done, and the consensus was against Nintendo all the time, and still now, there are a lot of people that can't accept what Nintendo has done, they call it "destroying gaming".
Man, I can tell you, nearly all the things you cited garnered bad press, kilometers long threads of hate, on videogame forums, when they appeared. To later manage to be huge successes in real life.

People are also quick to dismiss, or absently forget about the dangerous decline in the Japan videogame industry. Nintendo basically saved their core market in Japan, and made it thrive even more to boot.

I had the "chance" to be a lapsed gamer when I started noticing that in mid 2005. I couldn't understand all the hate, but didn't care at all. With my external view of this, I couldn't believe all the hate piled up on Nintendo. I think the worst was when the Wii name was announced.
I said I had the chance to have an external view, because it allowed me to not be blinded like I saw all the haters were at the time. The haters were describing a future completely opposite to what I saw with my fresh eyes of lapsed gamer.
I was shocked at the time, because I thought to myself: "the disease I saw years ago in reviewers has crept on all the gamers". Fortunately, the haters were not all of the gamers.
But reviewers still have this disease they had years ago, and the Wii is just making it even more apparent. Sad...

I absolutely agree that Nintendo can't do no wrong. That's realistically impossible for any person, group, or corporation.

to be honest i think that nintendo can do wrong and and has began to do alot of wrong lately. don't get me wrong i love my wii and ds, but i get a feeling that all this praise and success is makng nintendo loss their way a little bit. fair enough i get the picture that they want to expand the casual market and make good casual games (i've paid more then £100 for 4 controllers to play wii sports and marvel alliance with my friends by the way), because its very profitable. but i get the feeling they are forgetting or payin less attention to their core supporters.

i was kinda annoyed to hear project hammer got scrapped (or dropped for the time being) and the lack of advertising put behind metroid, day of crisis and so on (think they should of adverised metroid better or at least made a better advert then they did). i think that they need to put more emphasis on these kinda games because after all this was what propelled nintendo into a successful company and kept them alive pre-wii. i think ninty need to address this problem.

oh and on a side note they need to deal with companies like ubisoft, what they were saying about the wii in relation to finacning ps3/360 games is terrible, they shouldn't tolerate things like that (and i'm well aware that they probably cant do anything about it)

I think Nintendo's "Blue Ocean" strategy has contributed greatly to their success. They want to be dominant in markets where there is little or no competition. Fortuitous events (for Nintendo) have allowed them to compete this generation in a space where there is not much competition, hence they do well. Nintendo has been very good lately (and historically) at establishing genres that they get to then define and profit from. I also attribute some of Nintendo's success to their old fashioned business plan of making profits and a history of being profitable in the long term.

Its time for a change...a remarkeble change...........