^^This!

I Wholeheartedly agree, especially with the parts in bold. I will go out on a limb and say something borderline inflammatory, because I feel it needs to be said, and have felt so for a while now.

One of Nintendo's biggest assets, it's loyal and loving fan-base, is also one of it's biggest liabilities!  

As a relative newcomer to Nintendo gaming (you could say I'm one of those who never really got into gaming until fairly recently but was always interested) I find many of the points of view regarding Nintendo software, hardware and even business strategies to be extremist and unhealthy.

There is a consensus among many fans and even developers regarding a so called "Love-Hate" relationship with Nintendo, but it is very rare to see an honest attempt by a fan base to try to come up with anything resembling a coherent, realistic and constructive analysis of the company. Not just a critical one, mind you, but also one going into the company's many strengths and advantages in a manner that a manager within Nintendo itself can relate to.

Sometimes opinions about the company are so polarized, categorically narrow-minded or otherwise ill-explained that it's not surprising Nintendo often come to the conclusion that they're better off following their own instincts, as fans don't know what the hell they really want. This is of course not the case, but you would be hard pressed to gather a clear opinion from Nintendo followers by trying to sort through so many inconsistent, rampant and occasionally borderline-emo statements coming from the player-base.

Personally, I think a lot of this failure to communicate comes from the fact that a large portion of the "original" Nintendo fan-base is biased in one way or another. Having played Nintendo games during the defining years of their childhood, it's probable that they have formed an image of Nintendo that is strongly associated with their own personal, internal experiences growing up. This is in fact a well-known and documented phenomena in psychology and has also been discussed in the media in relation to the old star-wars films vs. the new ones, for example.(so please don't take this as a personal attack by myself on loyal Nintendo fans throughout the world, as I do not intend it to be as such by any means. Thank you for holding on to your pitchforks just a bit longer )

The main problem here, as far as I can understand is twofold:

1) Childhood experiences are personal, individual and extremely rigid!

This makes them both objective from a personal point of view on the one hand (they are what we take for granted as being obvious - the basis for our later experiences), and highly differing from a global point of view (each person has a different "mental image" of Nintendo, since everybody grows up differently and has a different perception of "the Nintendo experience").

Clearly there is no way a coherent criticism of the company can be extracted from such raw material, as it would seem to be impossible to even describe what Nintendo is, not to mention what it isn't, based on such wildly divergent and biased experiences.

2) Childhood experiences are inherently difficult to communicate!

This is also something that developmental psychology has explained, as many of our earlier life experiences are not processed through verbal channels, but rather through more abstract sensory and emotional ones, and therefor are appropriately more difficult to translate into words should the need arise.

Once again, this makes such experiences very bad candidates for forming the basis of any critical thinking since we can't even communicate them properly! Not even to ourselves, let alone to others!

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The way I see it, in order to offer better, more coherent criticism to the company, we must first do a much better job of communicating our personal preferences and expectations within the fan community. Only after having reached a consensus (or at least something close to one) should we try to make our opinions heard by the company... Otherwise, why should they listen!?

I realize I have been rambling on for quite a while now.. This is,to me, an important subject and one which I would like to take the opportunity to further explore and develop in its own thread... which I will be starting now

Cheers!

Yah, Amiga and Commodor were where its at. Adults used computers and kids used consoles. Though I think Nintendo really got hated during the N64 time period. Because of high cartridge costs and lack of mature games. Fanboys ripped on Nintendo for everything they did, Nintendo could never do anything right. I remember when a prominant 1UP employee called the GameCube a childrens toy, man I was pissed.

Yeah... great post. But the wording and reasoning doesn't change when you apply it to someone who grew up with Sony or Sega, or someone who is now growing up with Microsoft (or even Apple). Singling out any one group and going 'this is why they're like this' as a negative aimed solely at that one group is utterly redundant in that case...

Nintendo has been hated on since it made the NES since all the core and adult gamers were on their Apple 2 or the like playing their point and click adventure games... only kids played on consoles was the theme back then... boy how times haven't changed one bit 

The only thing that bothers me about Nintendo is they don't make new IP's anymore and Nintendo gamers seem to not care at all. Its just been Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Metroid, etc. forever. 

I don't get how Nintendo fans can not only accept this but defend them also.