LOL seriously? Didn't both the DS and the Wii come out during Iwata's tenure? The Wii U will have to bomb miserably to counterbalance those--and 4 months in is a little short to be predicting that.

By that standard, the PS3 should've been a complete and utter failure based on it's first 2 quarters.

Iwata has some good qualities one doesn´t usually associate with CEOs, but I´m not sure if he´s still the right person to be in charge of Nintendo.It´s a sad turn of events the man who presided over Nintendo´s biggest successes, DS and Wii, is also the same man who presided over the company´s first annual loss in several decades, and now has a system that´s been selling even worse than the disaster that was the PS3 back in 2007.

I wish him the best, this must be his toughest period as CEO.Wii U, and to a lesser extent 3DS sales in the West, must be keeping him up at night.

“If Nintendo’s business is trying to make a profit, once they conclude they aren’t going to make any money on hardware, of course they should exit the hardware business. And if they were to put their software on multiplatform they would probably sell twice as much software. So I think Nintendo, if they were to follow the SEGA route, would be immensely more profitable, but it’s not in their DNA…"

More intentionally bad advice to Nintendo from people in video game industry who wants Nintendo out of the business. They look rather desperate, even more desperate than Nintendo themselves.

What happens is that they perfectly know that a market crash is coming so the fewer competitors the better.

He's wrong about the consoles, though. Nintendo took a loss with GameCube after cutting the price six months after launch to $149.

They only made $12 or slightly more on Wii at $250. So that barely contributed to profits. Wii profits were from selling Wii Remotes for $49 and nunchuks for $20 when they cost barely anything to produce. And from insanely high software sales with games that sold in the top 10/20 for three or more years while remaining at $49 (Mario Kart, Sports Resort, Galaxy, NSMB, Brawl, etc).

So Pachter has incorrect information about Nintendo's past and present profitability on their hardware, and since he's basing his opinion of their business model on that incorrect information, the conclusions he's drawing are also incorrect as a result.

Dang it! I didn't know I would have to face you on this... *runs away*

Honestly, he's being too harsh, but there is some truth in what he's saying. Under current management, Nintendo has been very slow to adapt. Sometimes I get the feeling they still have that Nintendo arrogance of old, that "we're Nintendo, we make the rules" philosophy. We saw it at the 3DS launch, for certain. It's like they think they can still define and shape the market however they want, and perhaps the Wii's success played into that, but things have changed. They seem to be trying harder with the Wii U but I still get the impression that they're awfully rigid in some ways.

And if they think they can "collect royalties from third-parties for the privilege of putting their software on the console,” then they're seriously mistaken. It doesn't work like that any longer, not with two competitors going full speed ahead.

Patcher is a straight up fool.

I know man, what a bad CEO that Iwata is. Making over 10 billion dollars in six years, that's just pocket change. He shouldn't even have bothered!

lol.. most profit from sega sammy are from their arcade & pachislot machines... you know.. hardware...