Before starting I'd like to clarify that yes, I like Nintnedo among other gaming companies but they're very far to be immune for criticing, also my preference has nothing to do with childhood memories or something like that, in fact, even thoght I played a lot on SNES and N64 form a friend, I've never owned a Nintendo system before the Gamecube in 2004...before I had a Megadrive, Playstation, Playstation2, and PC.
I think Nintendo has mainly 3 problems, 2 of em' imo are also partally connected to each other.
1.Ability to Communicate (the most underestimated imo)
A company communicates with all of its aspects, from product design, to its employees, from its costumers to its suppliers, its policies ecc. and all of these aspects and activities contribiute to create, consolidate or modify the company image. Before the actual generation of consoles, Nintendo has voluntarily cosely tied its image to its iconic characters, istead of to what the overall experience on Nintendo systems was about, also the design of N64 and Gamecube was more toy-like compared to all of their competitors. These factors had contributed over the years to determine the childish image that N still has got in the eyes of many. It doesn't matter that N64 and GC had games such Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Quake, Turok, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instincts, Conker and later Resident Evil, Rouge Leader, Eternal Darkness and Metroid Prime...the fact is that Nintendo's comunications efforts were incoherent and one-sided, and many of these games remained unknown to mass potential buyers.
As for the situation of today, they have made some huge progress providing to Wii and to DS a true visual identity system, infact the abstatc image of Wii or no more related to a character but to its experience, more specifically the experince that is shown on Wii ads: a group of people of different age and gender, having fun playing toghether, often mimicking real-life gestures. These type of advertising is very useful to sell consoles and expanded-crowd games, but what about other games? Even in these case Nintendo is focusing it's communication only some of the aspects of Wii experience, while the others are neglected, and what is the result?
-Most of Wii best sellers are still from Nintendo-classic IPs or from new "casual" games, this means that also most of 3rd party serious efforts are to create Party games more than mainstream games (sure I think 3rd parties are mainly responsable for this but Nintendo is not helping),
-Many, less informed Wii users don't know what good games are coming out, also a lot of people is not even aware of many of the Wii Channels services (like Virtual Console)
-Even Nintendo itself has problems making good numbers out of mainsteream games whitout the Mario or Zelda character in it. (take Metroid Prime/Other M and Fire Emblem as examples).
That said, I know it's unthinkable to properly advertise each game but there are different forms of communication. 1st of all Nintendo MUST improve its online infrastructure and interface in order to provide their customers with a flow of content and information. It's undeniable that Nintendo online service is years behind Sony and Microsoft and I'm always talking about communication, not online gaming. Now, that's probably not possible during current generation but on Wii Nintendo could at least have tied (as I said in another thread) to bring demos and informations on discs and bundle them in consoles and games, this in order to work out distribution problems and to reach an high % of users.
I hope Nintendo will better consider these problems form now on, not for them, but for me as a consumer, since -I repeat- this kind of action could have a positive return on 3rd party support imo.
As for the other 2 problems, since this is getting quite long, I'll post em' later, I've got to go now
