badgenome said:
Well, I guess I was rather imprecise there. It's less about NoA or NoE having more autonomy than it is about HQ being less insular and more informed about trends outside of their rather strange little home market. That insularity is in part what makes Nintendo... Nintendo, but unfortunately it's also what keeps them a decade or more behind their competitors in terms of things like online policies. Though I suppose greater autonomy naturally follows from there. Sega was in many ways just a mess of a company, so I wouldn't let their stupidity color the practice. SCE has had a lot more success with it, for instance. I'd even say it's part of the reason that they cleaned Nintendo's clock with the PS1. Nintendo had always acted as if the world consisted of Japan and America, and that was it. But Sony took Europe very seriously and for the first time really marketed a games console to Europeans in their own languages and on their own terms. I don't think that would have worked so well without giving SCEE a lot more leeway. It seems like Nintendo themselves has gone backwards on this since the Howard Lincoln era, which you'll surely agree were successful times and certainly not a Sega style clusterfuck. It's hard to imagine Nintendo of America turning down something like Super Mario Bros 2 today and that resulting in the creation of a new SMB 2 for the US market today, and with Iwata becoming CEO of NoA I don't see them becoming more receptive any time soon. |
OK, I'll agree, BUT to be fair Sony has a different corporate culture than Nintendo. Nintendo may fall into disarray if NOE or NOA is given more autonomy. At the end of the day, no company is perfect.
*EDIT* I did not like what they did with SMB2 and the bullshit "let's reskin a different game and use it because the original SMB2 was too hard." excuse they came up with.