So they didn't implement a crucial feature because 1% of their audience wouldn't have been able to access it. Am I reading this right?

What a load of bull

sad thing is I actually saw some people saying he is right >_>

Wow.

Entertainment is a highly predictable industry with mountains of data, succesful products to emulate and mistaken products to avoid, some of them Nintendo's own. Creativity is not the foundation of a successful game company, it is process. Quality and craftsmanship, yes, but it has to be in service of releasing a product the market wants at the right time.

It's sad to hear those words from Miyamoto as it shows that even if he's made some right choices in the past he had no idea why they worked.

Maybe it is a good time for Myamoto to retire, he certainly shouldn't be making any business decisions.

I'm not saying the business decision not to invest in a more sophisticated online infrastructure was a wise one, but this article is really offensive. Not everyone has high-speed internet. In fact, as of 2011, about 65% of the world is offline.

Nintendo is very Japanese centric in it's thinking and to my understanding the Japanese home adoption of internet was lagging behind the rest of the world. Nintendo even partnered with one or more of the Japanese service providers to try to encourage more people to be online, including the Wii TV Channel and ordering food online through your Wii in Japan.

In Western markets this is of course complete hogwash. We've been gaming online since Unreal and Quake on PC.

What do you expect him to say? "Yep, we fucked up and should have done online a half-decade ago"? It's called PR (read; damage control), guys, and it's no less (or more) idiotic than Jonathan Blow's PS4 comments. Why anyone takes interviews with people trying to SELL YOU something seriously is beyond me...it's one thing if the guy is talking about his game dev philosophy, but on matters directly affecting the public perception of the company that pays him? Jesus...

 (And this is in Time magazine, where the average reader is about as informed about this stuff as most of you are on how PR works, i.e. it isn't for your consumption, per se, but the broader, clueless, public that buys consoles when they dip below $250.)

Over half the customers who walk into a electronic retailer (i.e. best buy ) do not have interent outside of their phone. I see them everyday, and more people are dropping their internet for mobile broadband, which doesn't sustain the amount of data needed for online gaming.

People with the internet are not in touch with this fact 

He's actually right. Even with the very online-centric XBox, most owners don't use it online. It's a hard concept for hardcore gamers to grasp. It's only in the late part of gen 7 (the last 3 years) that online and hi-def have become so important for a system. It's why Wii was huge for 4 years but PS360 have taken over. PS360 were over-engineered and premature. The perfect time to launch these systems was around 2010. PS360 was early to the party while Nintendo and WiiU is late.

Those are very fair questions. And it would have been nice had the Eurogamer author addressed such issues instead of making such a sarcastic and insulting article. I've been blessed my whole life with access to fast and reliable internet, but there are millions in the world who don't. And that includes people in North America, Europe, and Japan. It's still a luxury for many people.