Rank the Presidents of Nintendo

[bdbdbd]

TheMisterManGuy said:

bdbdbd said:

When Iwata came to the company, it was at a time Nintendo needed to react to the existing situation. Gamecube was for survival to stay relevant in the business and with PSP on the way, Nintendo needed to react to the threat it posed to Gameboy line. It might be that 3DS and Wii U were just using the existing strong brands to play time before the next move. 3DS was able to play Vita out of the market, so why not Wii U could do the same in home consoles.

Exactly. He was really good at quickly determining what Nintendo as a brand needed to be in the moment. But I feel he struggled to plan for the future after he achieved success with the Wii and DS. Keep in mind, the 3DS struggled during its first year, as Nintendo was banking on the strength of the Nintendo DS brand and the appeal of 3D to make it a hit. When that obviously didn't work, Iwata cut the price of the console only five months into its life, give everybody who bought it early an apology package of free software, and took a huge paycut to avoid laying off his staff.

The paycut Iwata took is kind of a tradition in Japan when company is doing badly. Not to avoid layoffs - then again, avoiding layoffs is also a tradition in Japan, which is why Howard Stringer was hired as a CEO to restructure Sony and lay staff off back in the day. And once it was done, Sony got again a Japanese CEO.

I agree that Iwata looks reactive rather than proactive. 3DS was his idea and it did manage to drive Sony off of handhelds, which makes Iwata successful in what he did. 3D was trending at the time 3DS released, so it could have been disruptive to Sony's 3D plans for Playstation, but 3D as a misstep overall. 2DS and New 2DS are pretty good producs, and in my opinion, what the 3DS should have been right out of the gate. Then again, Switch, using the Nintendo accounts for future and focusing development resources on one device was Iwata's idea.