Iwata made Yamauchi the richest man in Japan for a short period.

I would actually say that Iwata is better than Miyamoto. Yeah, Miyamoto is a great at creating games, but being an experienced and intelligent game developer in the CEO position with a knowledge of business, Iwata can take Nintendo much further than Miyamoto could.

He has built up the image of Ninty for the better. He is highly intelligent which you can see from his interviews. The lose of 3rd party support started with N64 for many reasons including the fact ps1 the #1 system. They lost  more support due to PS2 doing so well and Gamecube doing so poorly. They needed a better appoarch to be the market leader again and show Ninty was not going anywhere. When the Wii took off all the 3rd parties were surpised. Its a new market and many 3rd parties just do not get that. Many make shovelware that some enjoy, but many find them as unpolished and well crap. Not to mention what Ninty has done with the D.S. junder Iwata's control. Ninty did not lose anythign under his control they grew after some time spent researching and brainstorming for new ideas.

First of all, many changes did seem to come around the time that Iwata 'took over'. But I don't think they can all be linked directly to Iwata. Remember, many of these 'sweeping changes' are not entirely based on the financial side of Nintendo. Some were based on the games development themselves. Which were governed by people such as....Miyamoto (main producer and overseer of game development) or the games developers themselves.

Its true, Iwata may have come in and made some grand changes, but he couldn't have changed everything himself. If anything, what you may be seeing is the overall change from Yamauchis approach of controlling every little thing to a more open-ended approach of setting up studios who don't need a watchdog CEO with a red rubber stamp to approve every little action they do.

...and for the most part, this open-ended approach seems to be working quite well so far.

As most people have said so far, Yamauchi was a bit of a near-sighted tyrant. Heck, I'm sure we'd have a HD Native Nintendo platform with a 20 GB hard drive if he were still president.

Iwata is a more civil, passive-aggressive president who saw casual gaming as the next big thing. So yes, I suppose you're right to an extent.

... Yes, so like I said, Iwata's the best thing that happened to Nintendo since Miyamoto.

Iwata is some sort of genius blend of developer and businessman, and though he has certainly made mistakes (like when he came out and declared "customers do not want online play," though that is still partially true), he's really built a much more dynamic Nintendo, a new market leader, but only with the kind of savvy that a great developer and businessman could have utilized

I would imagine the changes are mostly on him, though not personally, just part of a change in corporate culture. You could see the beginnings of a less confrontational Nintendo back when he took charge, at least.

Hm I forgot one of the other people I meant to quote I was agreeing with you though. =)

Yeah, haha I got that from you post.

I would say that Iwata is the single most important person in video games right now. How he manages not to let that go to his head is beyond me.

He probably has, to some degree. Nintendo's decline in 2009 can be blamed on their poor strategy both in terms of their key titles in late 08, and the lack of titles in early 09. However that happened, much of the blame can likely be attributed to Iwata, as he has the most control over Nintendo's strategy and didn't see the flaws in it (perhaps he was lax as he was on quite a winning streak).

Hopefully 09 has knocked any feeling of being a 'business genius' out of him ;).