Just read the whole thing, and there are alot of interesting points, I agree with most of them. Couple of things bothered me. Consumers dont expect to buy Ninty hardware and have it be out of date? That makes no sense. They make consoles, consoles become out of date, just like TVs, VCRs, DVDs, anything electronic and you have to update to keep up. Unless he is talking strictly games, then I would agree.
I can see how GC was seen as a kids only console, but N64?? Some of their best games were not exactly kid friendly, GE, PD, Turok etc. ANd if this is the case, why was PS and PS3 so successful, it wasnt like their libraries were that much different and they weren't exactly churning out family friendly games.
I gotta call BS on 3d Zelda. Mario fine, but OOT remains the best selling Zelda game of all time. And surprise, the remake on 3DS is THE best selling 3DS game, for now
He says people dont buy want to buy Wii U with 360and PS3 games on them. What about the people who constantly cry about why this or that game is not on whatever Ninty console they are talking about?? Im sure there are Ninty fans who want to play those games, they might not be alot but they are out there.

I agree with most what he said, but dammit im an n64/GC kid. I grew up playing NES at my uncles house, playing SNES at friends houses, and i loved them, but i love those GC esque games dammit, and if NInty is trying to get those and do their family friendly thing, then let em. IF they cant then they better stick to the family friendly deal, I have not problem buying Wii U and PS4 next gen.

Alcohol, cigarettes and luxury goods

He makes excellent points. I like how he breaks down how certain things were successful/unsuccessful. I completely agree with him that Nintendo is an arcade style company. The N64 had good games, but it was no NES/SNES in terms of Nintendo quality. The GameCube was just a disaster. It's the only console, where I was disappointed in the Mario and Zelda games. I didn't play nor did I care to play Sunshine, and The Wind Waker felt incomplete. There are reasons why, the N64 and GameCube failed and why the NES, SNES and Wii were more successful. I just wonder, why can't Nintendo see these things?

The problem with Nintendo is that they push for new customers but forgot to keep the customers that they attracted, leaving them to get mopped up by MS/Sony.

True, good games dont go out of date, but people would still have to buy the new consoles to play the recent good games, that goes for any console maker. 

Yeah GC had a bad image, it didnt help that it was purple at first. And you're right, they did stop being a family console.

I meant PS2, and yeah they have a complete different image than Ninty

OOT yeah it got ads, I sorta agree with you on the reamke, but if people didnt care then why are they buying a game, that has been available for years and cheaper ins large numbers. Are 3DS owners that starved for games that they are going to pluck down full price for a game that they most likely have played at least once before? Sure it has little competition but contrast that to Nintendogs, that game did a killing on DS, and the new one has yet to cross a million (its close) and that was released at launch, Zelda OOT was released not too long ago and it already passed it. It has to be more to it than just, OOT had a lot of ads.

I dont know, ive heard people complain about more than just a few games. But yeah they are in the minority for the most part, most people just buy another platform for those anyway

This sums up my problem with the modern day Nintendo perfectly.  Having been a gamer since the early days of the NES, I've grown with Nintendo and watch them and their games evolve over the years from the NES to N64 eras, only to have them sort-of "devolve" I guess you could say over the previous 2 generations to where they try to appeal to everyone all at once, many times sacrificing the quality of their games to do so.

Nintendo no longer really pushes the envelope of gaming not just from a technical perspective, but also no longer really does so from a gameplay perspective which used to be their bread and butter.  With each new Mario and Zelda in the series for example, we were always introduced to a new feature or gameplay mechanic that was not only innovative but challenged us in a way that had never been done before, like with the 3D mechanics in Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time, or the power-ups and hidden areas / multiple pathways of SMB3 and World.  Now its like all they do is rehash old gameplay mechanics with just a sprinkle of nostalgia to keep the hardcore coming back hoping that this time things will be different, like with the Tanooki suit coming back in SM3D Land (even though the leaf powerup from SMB3 turned Mario into Racoon Mario NOT Tanooki Mario! but I digress).

And the thing I hate most is the newer Zelda games, where they feel the need to walk you through EVERYTHING from the basic controls and combat to what to do and where to go next.  This was a minor annoyance in OOT with Navi, but it had gotten even worse in Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and now Skyward Sword looks to be just as bad if not worse.  While companies like Valve tease our brains, eyes, and funnybones with games like Portal 2, Nintendo seems content with repackaging the same old stuff for the 100th time and slapping "New" on to it.  This is why they have such a tough time bridging the gap between the old guard and the new school, more "casual" audience.

I can sum up what he is saying pretty quickly and agree with it.

Nintendo runs into problems when stop acting like Nintendo.

Steve Jobs had a motto that "people don't know they want something untill you tell them"

All issues tie back to capacity. Nintendo can satisfy the old guard and the N64 kids (and i myself am totally an N64 kid, given that i got into gaming in 1999 and my first game was Mario 64), but only if they have the capacity to do so, and games can be given with appeal across both markets

Primarily they need more development teams, or larger teams with the groups they already have

I do agree with the first part of the article, he made a good picture about how Nintendo is (not) in touch with their costumers lately, about how they have screwed up with 3DS so far. But I do not agree to the rest of the article. He is generalizing way too much, he is assuming every Nintendo user wants the same thing also he is not even considering competition.

He basically says GC and N64 failed because they were different from how customers define Nintendo

 "People have the expectation of buying a Nintendo product and still be enjoying it decades later. People associate Nintendo with the arcade side of games from platformers and action games."

So MK64 ,Excitebike64, Waverace, Starfox64, F.zero X, 1080°, Smash Bros were not arcade games? Mario64, OoT, Majora , Paper Mario, Smash Bros were not the kind of games you colud still enjoy a decade later?

The thing is competition matters, it's not only about Nintendo. If N64 wasn't succesfull it's because most consumers felt they had a better alternative with Ps1. Nintendo did a bad job with N64 but not on their own software side. They screwed up with cartridges, losing most of their jp 3rd party support also Sony had a better marketing and better logistics. Sony hardware and software was better distributed. I remember in those days I could find N64 games only in a few stores and they were ultra-expansive. Another example: Ps1 games were translated in many languages as opposed to N64 games which were generally only in english/french/german.

To continue, according to article Nintendo pushed to make more "mature" games on Gamecube but it didn't work because its customers wanted it to be family friendly.

I have quite different memories of those days. Like Ps2 and Xbox having all mature games, and GC having only Metroid Prime (which can hardly be considered an M-rated game) , Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness. The rest of the time Nintendo made games like Smash Bros, Sunshine, Pikmin, Double Dash, a dozen of Mario sports/party etc.etc.

If mature games didn't work on GC it wasn't because of its users wanting it to be family friendly, it was simply because GC was out of competition with M-rated games. For every M-rated game on GC there were 10 games on Ps2 or Xbox. If you were interested in M-rated games there was no reason to buy a GC. To make things worse Nintendo made the console and the gamepad look toyish, so that costumers couldn't even by mistake associate the GC with M-rated games.

Then he talks about DS success. basically DS became successful when Nintendo started ignoring the touch-screen to shift attention to arcade games like NSMBW and MKDS. In this way "The DS began to be how consumers define Nintendo".

Really? If you sum up how much those 2 games sold you have 48million units (according to VGChartz). This means (in the unlikely case no one has bought both games) that 48m out of 148m DS users own one of those games. What about the other 100m?

What I mean is he can't generalize so much, not every Nintendo costumers have the same definition of Nintendo also lots of DS users bought a Nintendo product for the first time, they had no definition of Nintendo to begin with. DS became their own definition of Nintendo. My mother have always hated videogames and didn't know anything about them. Surprisingly, she actually started playing DS, later she got its own as a gift and at the end she bought more DS games than me and never touched Super Mario or Mario Kart. Does he think me and my mother have the same definition of Nintendo?

The same logic applies to Wii. "The Wii was what consumers tought of Nintendo" . "In the consumers eyes the Wii wasn't new so much[...] Wii Sports Tennis was nothing more than a motion controlled version of PONG" . Not really, a huge part of Wii buyers were playing games for the first time, in their eyes Wii Sports was actually something new and different, most of em probably didn't even know what PONG is. Even in this case he can't talk of a pre-existing idea of what Nintendo is or should be.

I don't undertand what is this article suggesting exactly? Nintendo should stop innovating and making new consoles only to start releasing a Super Mario or a Wii Sports game every year? I don't think this would work in the long term. Customer satisfaction is needed to make users loyal in the long term; games like SMB, Wiiports, MK or Smash Bros are excellent but are not enough to satisfy everyone. If they want to keep every customer satiasfied (not only  protion of them) they will have offer as many kinds of games and genres as possible. 

The article calls WiiU a failure already even tough we don't know exactly what games Nintendo is developing for it. From what I know now the only clear thing is that WiiU is made with the attempt to gather as much 3rd party games as possible and that's the only way to offer a great variety of games. I'll decide if the WiiU is a disappointment when I'll see what kind of software it will get from both Nintendo and 3rd parties.