At the same time, the role of the CEO is to do just that. People who want their funds preserved should put them in a bank. By investing in a company, people do and should expect a return on their investment.

@bold. And they never will as that is not part of their pricing strategy. You can disagree all you want but it's a philosophical decision. If Nintendo starts pricing down its full game releases (I'm not talking about lightweight e-shop software), it's basically game over for them. As for volume of releases, that's the same argument as in 1. The low sales of Brain Age are mostly due to a poor migration from the DS to the 3DS of the casual market, I have no idea how Nintendo could have countered that honestly and the first solution you presented is game over for Nintendo so you're basically asking for the impossible. They were between a rock and a hard place and the outcome is what it was, Nintendo would have had to be genuises to get out of that one.

As for investments to support two platforms, Nintendo has a certain business structure built around some of its key artists. They probably will have a lot of trouble breaking out of that model and just pumping out resources. Money isn't the only thing that matters these resources need to be managed and it doesn't seem like Nintendo's model can support that, and at what risk of cost an architectural business change may come.

This is why you are not, and will never be in charge of any sort of company.

If Nintendo canceled the Wii U and instead decided to release a copy of the PS4 with a Nintendo logo on it to be released anytime soon, you'd see a console with no OS, no software, and no potential buyers. That would be an incredibly stupid move.

If Nintendo is having trouble getting software out on the Wii U, they would most certainly have trouble getting software out on a system that would require even more Dev time.

Also 90 - 77 = 13, not 30.

You can't do math, and you don't seem to be able to think in a logical manner, this is why you'll never be in charge of anything.

why gamers think buying more developers was the right thing to do on the past when the Wii was at its best?
you can not keep increasing your team limitless, you won't maintain quality and on bad months you will loose huge money and end up firing the devs. Like Sony did a lot this past generation (PS3).
That is the reason why Nintendo has survived the N64 and Gamecube era.
There is always a reason behind Nintendo's decisions I mean 30 years on the video game industry for such a small company and just 1 year at lost is a tremendous achievement.

Iwata’s investor approval rating drops down to 77.26%

Nintendo CEO, Satoru Iwata, approvel rating drop about 30% from investors. It used to be at 90.96%.

That's about 14%, talk about shit math.

Beaten. Anyway that's much less of a drop than I would expect given the past years events.

I don't like that Iwata has invested essentially nothing into building new studios, and expanding current ones. Nintendo is obviously woefully unfit to fill a console by themselves as of late, and they don't have any third party. You're going to have to expand.

Thus they ceded the casual market.  Nintendo were only fooling themselves if they thought they could sell Brain Age for $30 on 3DS.  That's the thing, a lot of their casual software on DS is not all that different from lightweight e-shop software or iphone games.  Yet they thought they could garner a retail release at a high price.  Would making Brain Age a $1-5 downloadable title seriously be game over?  PC has proven that games can exist at a multitude of different price points and pricing models.  Right now the top 10 on steam range from $3.39-59.99 with most falling about halfway in between. Even phone games have shown this to a lesser extent.

Also, I feel like the whole premise is misguided.  If the casual market is already buying the dirt cheap iphone games, would it really make an impact on Fire Emblem sales if Brain Training was dirt cheap as well?  It's not like Nintendo is planting the seed, it had already sprouted a long time ago.  I mean you can get Minecraft on phones for $6.99, yet sales seem to be as good as ever on PC at ~$26.

If their current model is so lumbering that they couldn't make changes in the 6 years between the Wii and Wii U, then they should probably take on whatever cost there is to reorganize.  It would do well for them not to be so centered around those key artists as well.  The same could be said for a lot of Japanese publishers though.

"About 30%? more like 13...

iwata has bought Monolith, made a partnership with SEGA and Platinum, is outsourcing smah bros and has fully reorganized Nintendo developpment team.

The investor approval is still overwhelmingly high. It will be even higher when Nintendo will post healthy profit next year.

You make good points, but can all this be blamed on Iwata? Much of these decisions (full game pricing, company ogranization model) are part of Nintendo's fiber. Is Iwata the man to change this or is that part of their company identity and culture, hence decided on by a board?

If their choices are bad, then they are all to figure it out I believe. I could be wrong since I've never been in their board meeting, but from what I understood most architectural decisions like that are decided by the board which include Yamauchi, Miyamoto and a few others last I was informed (I could very well be wrong).