I stand by my initial post.
Selling Rare was one of Iwata's intial big moves as president. Iwata was being groomed to be president of Nintendo long before May 2002 as well, it's not like Yamauchi showed up at his doorstep and said "here, run the company starting today, oh by the way you have to sell Rare starting tomorrow bye".
From 2002-to the end of 2004, most of Nintendo's relationships with the likes of Factor 5, Silicon Knights, Left Field are basically ended one by one. Rare is gone with no replacement given.
Now the difference is to me, it's on the president ... the buck stops with him IMO. If Iwata wanted to keep these studios or replace them with comparable studios he could have. He didn't. It's his company, one with ample resources at that. This is the direction they took and it was no accident.
Iwata's Nintendo is more closed off and Japanese centric than Nintendo was in the 90s. Anyone seriously want to debate that? All I see is some people wanting to attribute that basically to a series of poor coincidences that left Iwata with no choice. I don't buy it.
