I guess were gonna have to put up with drama for a few more months.

Nintendo is fine. The 3DS is dominating the portable market and is gonna make rivers of money, and the Wii U is gonna have to hold on until next fall for a price cut. I still think they are in a very good competitive situation having launched sooner. They are in far better position to have profits for the coming years then they were last year. I guess launching a console without a 3D Mario is a big no-no now.

The coming year should be hugely successful for Nintendo. The WiiU should do at least "OK" with big titles hitting and 3DS should have the biggest year of its life with Animal Crossing heading west and Pokemon on tap. The weak Yen should bring things closer to their glory days when the Yen was so weak. If Nintendo doesn't have a big year, Iwata should resign. But they most likely will have a good year and so he most likely won't.

Seconded. Where does he actually drop such a hint? Saying he feels "accountable" is not the same as implying resignment. To be perfectly clear I want him to resign if he continues coming up with failures like... pretty much anything Nintendo does currently. Such a statement would increase pressure on him to improve performance and I'd welcome that but the article is misleading. I'm afraid Iwata will stick around no matter what and get the company even deeper into trouble.

You don't have a clue. Sony is a massive corporation, so when SCE make  a big loss it has daddy Sony to bail it out. Nintendo doesn't have that luxury because their only products are two game machines and they are tiny corporation by comparisson. So if one of their two big products is failing like the Wii u, it hurts nintendo in a big way.

Sucks that "Daddy Sony" is failing, too.

Big daddy must be getting raped pretty violently atm then....

Not sure getting rid of Iwata would do much. I have a feeling there are other people over at Nintendo holding the company back, a bunch of old farts living in the past.



Reggie needs to go though. >_> I want Cammie back!

@ Rest of the thread: What are you guys talking about? Nintendo is not fine, both their console and handheld markets are in severe decline and Iwata, being the CEO and responsible for Nintendo's operations, is to blame for this. Iwata was really smart using Blue Ocean strategy and making their next console a disruptive one - his analysis of the video gaming market in the early 2000's was spot on and his actions well thought out. But after that things just went downhill in every possible regard. Here's some blatant mistakes Nintendo made under Iwata's lead that any mediocre CEO should have been able to avoid:

- Not following up the first waves of mass market games on the Wii with new titles, thus letting the Wii die
- Completely abandoning the mass market with the 3DS
- Pricing the 3DS insanely high just because Iwata himself thought they "could charge that price"
- Not providing a decent line-up in the first year of the 3DS
- Pushing numerous games back in the west and right now acting all surprised the console isn't selling (!)
- Abandoning the customers of the Wii with the Wii U because they wanted to focus on "the core gamer"...
- ... which equals going back to the business strategies that almost bankrupted the company some years ago
- Not providing a decent launch line up for the Wii U despite claiming to have "learned a lesson"

Other things include:
- Not following up Nintendo's growth with the acquisition of new development studios
- The Fallout with EA which will strip Nintendo of any serious EA support for years
- The inability to keep his own developers in check (5 years of Zelda dev cycle, 3D Mario, Pikmin 3 announcement)
- His inability to make sure deadlines are being met (like 50% of the Wii U Q1 line-up was pushed back!!)
- Repeatedly (!) overestimating demand for Nintendo systems in their FY forecasts
- The inability to create an account system for their consoles and the resulting "data transfer" fiasco

--> To sum it all up Iwata (and some of Nintendo's managers and developers) got full of themselves, which is the only possible explanation for some absolutely mindboggling decisions the company made over the last few years. As CEO Iwata's job is to run the company and he's responsible for all of this. Nintendo is looking more and more like Apple did in the 90's: Continuously making questionable business decisions while sitting on a gold mine.

Yes, and yes.