I agree with this. Iwata is the genius that pulled the WiiDS out of his ass like magic. He made bilions for his co. with only some basic clever ideas...he has A LOT of credit left.

Rayman wouldn't have made the sales much better alone. The problem with WiiU is not the Rayman delay alone. It should've had more first party titles to begin with. Yes, Nintendo wanted to give 3rd-parties room to breathe. But it doesn't work. Better make cooperation like W101, Lego City, SMT vs. FE, SSB developed by Namco and so on. More of that.

I fully agree here.

People talk about Sony as if they were the peak of the industry.
First. Iwata has led Nintendo to the best console generation and handheld generation.
No other Nintendo console has sold more than Wii, nor handheld more than DS. Sony has been falling since PS2 by their own arrogance selling expensive systems when they just have to bring a new console upgraded. They have been loosing money for the last 7 years. Nintendo lost money not because of Wii at the end of its cycle but because of Iwatas decision on 3DS price. In my opinion, it's the only mistake he has made.
Second. Just because Nintendo aquire new studios doesn't mean that they are going to produce successful games. Look at Sony, bying western studios right and left, but they can't maintain a proper quality control on all of them. How many studios has Sony released in the last year? exactly. Look what Nintendo usually does: Retro Studios, at the beggining, had 4 projects but they did complete none of them. Instead of firing people, Nintendo sent Miyamoto for one last chance, enlighthing retros creativity. Those are the decisions that change the course of the things in a good way.
It is just simply hard to transition to HD. Look at all this big publishers closing left and right. Nintendo has the idea of how to be succesful, Iwata has it, by partnering with other studios instead of buying them strengthening both at the same time without risking their jobs.
New ideas need time to progress, more time if they are good.
How many times has we heard about a Nintendo strategy that make us laugh? But then they laugh at us, in a good way, because none of us can see beyond what our eyes can.
Nintendo needs to keep being Nintendo, its their only chance in this unstable industry.
Iwata will make mistakes, but who with no mistakes is succesful?

No, he actually didn't. That was no magic, Iwata simply followed two very influential business theories and he openly stated so. Just look at these two books:

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-Competition/dp/1591396190/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365087242&sr=8-1&keywords=Blue+Ocean+Strategy

--> Blue Ocean Strategy (DS followed this guideline) deals with the problem of direct competition (red oceans) and how to avoid competition by creating new markets (blue oceans). Nintendo followed this strategy because of the PSP and the threat it represented!

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365087334&sr=1-1&keywords=the+innovators+dilemma

--> The Innovator's dilemma. This one deals with disruptive technology. And Nintendo cited this work sooo many times in 2005 and 2006 that it still baffles me how all those awesome gaming "journalists" never even bothered to read the book and explain the success of the Wii. Instead we got all that "casual gamer" crap lol.

I've mentioned those books dozens of times in these forums but no one seems interested in reading them. Just read them and it'll be like a 1:1 representation of the things Nintendo did with the Wii and DS. The Innovator's dilemma at times sounds like it was written because of Nintendo, so uncanny is the resemblence. These theories also perfectly explain the success of the iPod, iPhone, iPad (Steve Jobs called the latter one the most influential book he had read in his life), why the NES won against personal computers, why Nintendo failed with the N64 and Gamecube (and currently the Wii U) and why the 3DS struggled in the beginning.

Some interesting points, but I think laying the blame--and any praise--entirely on Iwata misses the point.

Yes, he's the President, but he's also one part of a board of directors who chart the overall course of the company. Iwata doesn't make decisions or chart the strategy by himself, even if he is the most prominent face of Nintendo's corporate decision making. I'd say he's good for Nintendo while being part of the problem, but I think that without someone as simultaneously humble and as decisive as Iwata, Nintendo would be in worse shape.

There's no doubt many of Nintendo's policies--particularly online and with digital distribution--have been backward looking, but how much of this is down to Iwata? How much of the change in direction at Nintendo has been engineered by Iwata? The question that we should really ask, and that can't be answered, is how much of Nintendo's current direction is down to the rest of the board?

What has Iwata really done, and spoken about as his personal missions? Iwata has gradually increased Nintendo's development capacity. One of his first acts as President was to restructure Nintendo's long standing internal arrangement. This year he's set to massively restructure the way Nintendo's R&D divisions operate. Iwata pushed ideas like Wi-Fi Connection, Virtual Console, Wii Connect 24 and Miiverse at major trade shows and conferences as vital to the future of Nintendo. He seems to me to be more forward looking than many people give him credit, and I have to wonder, and I partially suspect, that the rest of Nintendo's board became jittery as the phenomenal growth of the Wii/DS ground down, and they demanded another change of direction. There have been plenty of voices shouting to drown out Iwata's own message over the years, and it seems many of Nintendo's investors listened to the message. What's to say some board members haven't had the same doubts? What's to say they didn't have their own doubts about the direction of the company, the wisdom and the long-term stability of the Wii/DS approach? Perhaps Nintendo's paradoxical ability to remain stuck in the past isn't down to a flippant, backwards peddling Iwata, but to a board afraid to take more risks with their company. After all, Nintendo is not a corporate dictatorship--there's a board of directors making decisions and tinkering with strategy, while Iwata remains the public face of this corporate side.

The truth is, Iwata has made serious mistakes--but has also guided Nintendo to their best ever position in the videogames industry. He has taken the fall publicly and financially for the failings of 3DS, and acted in the long-term interests of the company when many other people in his position would bow to investor pressure and have either abandoned hardware after the GameCube era or moved into smartphone development rather than placing faith in the long term future of dedicated hardware. It's very, very easy right now to throw darts at a man at the helm of a company facing serious challenges. It's easy--with hindsight--to diminish the accomplishments of Nintendo during this era and to accentuate their failings under Iwata's stewardship. But it misses the point. Nintendo is not a one man show and the blame and praise of the last decade rests on the entire board and management at Nintendo. They all need to change.

Jettisoning Iwata might seem like a good idea to keyboard warriors who assume Iwata is single handedly responsible for the direction of a company with a board of directors, but it's not going to solve anything. Iwata has already as good as said (in Japanese corporate speak) he will step down if the current plan does not follow through as he wants it to. Keyboard warriors may yet get their head on a pike and feel justified.

However, I feel those are the actions and words of a CEO you want to keep hold of--someone at the top not afraid to take drastic action, someone not afraid to confront their mistakes, not afraid to take personal responsibility for failures. We don't know what the boardroom politics are at Nintendo, but given the turbulence, failings and enormous success of the last decade, I'd say the problem isn't just Iwata. Hell, perhaps we should pause and consider the possibility it might not even be Iwata at all.

Overall, Nintendo tries to make sound business decisions. Looking at Western development as a whole, is it really that smart to throw their hat into that mess?

Studios are pouring massive budgets into their games to appease the western crowd and when the games fail to sell, they take large losses. Nintendo likely sees full on western development as an extremely risky business move. Studios are closing left and right and Square Enix is hurting big time mainly due to their western projects. They heavily courted a big western developer (EA) to try and mitigate the launch slump, but they pulled support as fast as they could, as we all know. Ubisoft just got scared and it might have had to do with MS's dumb policy about 3rd party games. Why blow $80m on a game targeted towards people who don't buy those games en masse? Square Enix tried it, but those games just aren't profitable and now SE is in trouble.

Personally, I'm glad Nintendo isn't pushing western development. It's really quite risky considering how fickle gamers are and SOMEONE needs to have something different. Iwata has had to deal with the large hole Yamauchi made with his business practices. Replacing Iwata might seem like a solution to the "problem", but the next person in charge would likely do the exact same things. Even though the Wii U isn't doing so hot, the 3ds will help mitigate the difference until the games start showing up. It is far too early to call for his head.

As much as we all love Reggie......could he be more of an issue than Iwata? He is the man on the ground for a large portion of the West (I don't even know the NoE guy's name....)

Edit: Also, everything Asriel said. haha

Of course it's Iwata's fault the 3rd parties lied about supporting the WiiU.
He should have seen through them.

Check the batteries of your sarcasm detector.

OT: People are overreacting, gen is just beginning, if Nintendo hasn't showed a good fight plan by fall (before competition launches consoles), I'd then start questioning direction.

People seem to forget what has already happened, would a powerful console really attract 3rd parties? We don't know, and we would never know. Hopefully they were aware of the weak support they would get, and they are preparing to increase the first and second party production.

I'm actually quite interested in the Innovator's Dilemma since I follow the work of the Clay Christiensen's (the author's) student Horace Dediu.  An amusing anecdote is that Christiensen himself did not recognize the iPhone as a disruption initially, dismissing it as a sustaining innovation for the smartphone market.  More recently he said he came to realize that it was actually disruptive as a portable computer rather than an expensive phone.