01Net Strikes Yet Again: Iwata near firing

[LordTheNightKnight]

gumby_trucker said:

LordTheNightKnight said:
"Nintendo is a business, not a charity."

That's a great rebuttal to such a mindset. Art is not charity. Casablanca wasn't made out of Warner Bros. wishing to bless the world with such a film. Neither was The Godfather, which wasn't even something Coppola wanted to make, but his small studio was going under.

Art is business, not a charity.

I think reviniente hit the nail on the head with this one as to why it's such a delicate issue. When your business is art there really does exist a fundamental conflict of interest at the very core. Personally I think there is very little correlation between good art and good business - for every "Godfather" there is a "Blade Runner", for every Michelangelo there is a Van Gogh. Good art is about making money just as much as running a good business is about artistic expression; Sometimes the two work together, sometimes they don't.

Thankfully the industry is smart enough to realize that long-term growth is important enough to account for some short-term losses. Hell, even Little King's Story is getting a sequel!

Van Gogh was more a victim of artists around him having their own ideas of what art should be, and when people outside that got a look at his work, it became popular. It's a similar thing to Star Trek, which turned mainstream enough to have a film franchise (it was the medicrity of Voyager and the crap of Enterprise that brought it down), but when the show was on, the network tried to screw it.

So the mainstream can actually make popular what those in art circles think is bad.