@Bold:  I personally feel I could do much better of a job.  While his spelling isn't bad, it isn't really indicative of anything.  I rarely make spelling errors on here, and when I do I fix them shortly afterwards.  His sources are also not very good.  There are quite a few things he misinterpreted about the data he's looking at as well, and many times where he jumps to a conclusion simply because of a correlation (which shows he isn't a good researcher).

@Second paragraph:  I don't think it was as much about the resources as it was about Nintendo being anal about polishing a game to a certain level.  I recall reading that Nintendo didn't put the game on the Wii because it didn't fit with what they wanted out of the game (hardware wasn't strong enough).  In the end, Nintendo has definitely been late to the HD party and is paying the price for it.  This, however, means very little in terms of the argument OP makes.

@Third paragraph:  I definitely am aware that Nintendo didn't do very much to cater the Wii U to 3rd parties, but they were definitely thinking about it with the Wii U.  They just made the balance for what they wanted/needed and what they thought third parties wanted/needed really bad, which translated to a system that doesn't cater very well to the majority of gamers.  The games are quite possibly the only thing that can save the system, and since the system has little support it is doomed to a relatively low lifetime sales number.

Anyway, I personally feel like the OP has something personal against Nintendo because the rhetoric is clearly antagonistic.  

Well if you won't agree that the OP wrote a good article, will you at least agree that journalism in gaming is a complete joke? OP does have a bias towards Nintendo (e.g. the royalties during the NES era did partly save the game industry by cleaning out a lot of crap).

Pikmin 3 was 85% done before it got switched to the WiiU. Maybe they are anal, but if they had a grand scheme of the game, they should have switched it to the WiiU earlier. This is just poor management on their part. A better example would be Kid Icarus, it was designed from the start to be an early 3DS title, and it was great.

LOL Nintendo had 3rd parties in mind, okay. They've gone from completely ignoring them with the N64, to keeping 3rd parties in mind. This is still far behind Sony who designs their systems after talking to 3rd party studios. This is why now most PC games are limited by PS4/XB1 specs, Sony and MS listened, and now 3rd party studios want to put their games on those respective systems.

Personally I feel Nintendo fell because of Hiroshi Yamauchi's retirement. He designed the ultra successful DS, and play a role in Wii's design. Iwata said he would resign if WiiU sales didn't break 5 million for the 1st fiscal year, which they didn't. He's just not talented enough to run the company, and I feel WiiU was his attempt at replicating DS's design and sales. Everyone makes mistakes though (Gunpei Yokoi - creator of Metroid, retired after making the failure that is Virtual Boy). Hopefully Iwata will make the next Nintendo a proper console. If not, I fear for the company.

@Bold: I suppose.  I haven't read too many gaming journalists' articles, but I do know they aren't the best (sort of mediocre).

@Italics:  I'm not entirely sure about this whole process, and I would probably need to research it more but I personally didn't feel like the Wii U was replicating the DS's design, and I read that the Wii U was never meant to do Wii levels of sales (much less DS levels).  I think the Wii U was much more done because of the Tablet trend going on.  I personally like the gamepad, but it's probably due to my heavy preference for being unrestricted with my gaming locations (AKA why I really like handhelds).

You may disagree, but it's at least well written and argued and there are a few good points.

Things like not refunding faulty machines, limiting the number of games by 3rd parties, the YouTube scandal, strictness with region-locking and odd formats to avoid piracy, high royalties, etc do show that Nintendo has been a bit stingy and tried to abuse the market to their advantage whenever they could.

It doesn't mean Nintendo are evil, and despite their low-investment, high profit margin approach, they make great games. But if they want to compete in this market they need to change and I think they have changed to some degree, if only because they were forced by market changes.

LOL, you really believe that stuff about WiiU is weaker than PS3? Oh god. First rule of propaganda: don't believe your own lies. You should be provng me, that PS3 is more powerful than WiiU, but I will help you a bit: look at games like X, and say they are possible on PS3?

And you spin your argument around - your argument was, that PS2 was most powerful as it was released, hence it was cutting edge. If we want to use logic and apply the same argument to WiiU, you say no, it doesn't apply here, because ... it is Nintendo. Well, that's logic! You're my hero.

But that's a general pattern, that you ignore all logic. Your profit-argument ids only true  for MS and Sony, not for Nintendo. That's incredible. I don't even want to talk about the fact, that losses resulting from a loss-leading strategy are invested into marketshare, not games. I don't want to talk about the fact, that companies usually invest on profits, not losses. What Nintendo did, they created a lot more gaming-IPs over the years, than Sony and MS together. That is investment in gaming. But you aren't even willing to use your own argument in it's consequence. In your initial post you even said that Sony made initial profit (and therefore ripped customers off), but SHOULD now have balanced out. You don't deliver facts. So, a shorter time of losses for Sony is good for gamers, but a shorter time of losses from Nintendo isn't. Again, no logic at all.

There were always tons of shovelware/terrible games on the NES ... like those Friday the 13th games (lol). There were plenty of times where I game I rented wasn't even worth the rental fee on the NES, lol. I actually grew up with an NES so I remember. There were great games of course but there were plenty of terrible ones too. 

The thing was it was still a far better system than the Sega Master System because even though the Sega had some pretty cool 1st party games, it had virtually nothing else. Nintendo was the system to play if you wanted the most games in every genre, not just Mario.

Somewhere between there and now, Nintendo somehow turned their console model into the Sega Master System model, while handing away the "NES role" to Sony/MS.

The Wii/DS formula works great, when there is no Apple/Google to disrupt it and you can come reliably come up with an exciting new gimmick every couple of years. Unfortunately that is not so easy to pull off and competing against Apple/Google and the smartphone is honestly harder than competing against Sony/MS directly. People are not willing to give up their smartphone for anything, it's their *life* and kids gravitate to tablets like a fly drawn to a light. 

Yes, a game engine is to give tools to develop a game and, yes, Nintendo's game engines match the criteria that they need to make the games they want to make. No issue, they just don't want to make top-notch game engines. That's all.

Current gen tech means anything similar to X360/PS3 on the 7th gen or anything similar to XOne/PS4 on the 8th gen. Basically you see how far are consoles going on each gen. Many PS2 were sold during 7th gen but that was not current gen at that time.

Above the average, I clearly defined that earlier: remove the shovelware, then make the average.

Realism is not the keyword here. Commitment, deepness are more like it. This is a very hard thing to explain but I will do my best.

As a fan of videogaming, what matters to me is that this industry produces high-quality games. That's what really matters. But quality is about how much a game is appreciated by each person. Then, it varies from gamer to gamer, because it is about tastes. Talking about tastes is going around in circles, it's not possible to argue on this field. What is awesome to someone may be awful to another (and even if it isn't so, one can say it is without having to prove anything, "it's just about my tastes", he/she could say). So, we only have 2 options if we want to debate quality: either we say it's only about tastes, each person has his own, end of the story, let's go out of this forum ; or we remove tastes from the equation and see what's left.

For those that stay on the "quality" debate, that's the big question: what's left? In my opinion, what's left is the commitment of each dev (effort/time/money) shown on measurable (objectivity) remarkable (relevance) achievements. Once it's measurable, it's not about subjectivity anymore and thus is give us a commong ground to debate. Once it's remarkable, it proves it is related to quality. Once it requires effort/time/money, it proves it is rare (only few are willing to spend so much resources) and thus it's valuable. Therefore, any achievement one can find that fits into this criteria is proof of commitment to work towards quality. Is this a perfect criteria? Not at all. Is this a good quality filter? Absolutely.

Realism is not really necessary. A made-up city may have required as much work as a realistic one. However, it is much easier to assess commitment on realistic games, once any deviation from reality means lack of effort. On the other hand, any lack of effort on the creation of a made-up city may be seen as an artistic option. The lack of effort is disguised here. An exellent example on how realism promotes effort is The Getaway:

- They have recreated the modern London. It's one of the very few sandbox games (if not the only one) that has recreated in 3D a real modern city. They had to buy cinematic equipment to capture every inch of every street to afterwards design it in 3D. They ended up skipping many streets and anyone can easily perceive that lack of effort. Yet, that small and truncated sample of London became a unique asset of the whole industry (as far as I know, there isn't out there any better recreation of a modern city). This achievement showed a great commitment from Team Soho and is one of the greatest software benchmarks that magnifies videogaming and imposes some respect to those that despise it.

- They have recreated real cars and real characters. Once more, they had to buy equipment that would let them capture and render those cars and characters. They were pioneers (the first or one of the first) in the movement capture of the bodies and facial expressions. They got to know real people with real lifes that were similar to the ones of the characters from the game. For example, to play the character of a boxer that was also a gangster they recruited a boxer that was also a gangster. To play the character of a high-profile business man, they convinced a real high-profile business man to enter in the project. Etc. These real people were rendered to the game, did all the action scenes to capture their movements and did their own voices too. This whole process demanded a lot of time, interviews, cinematic preparation, performances, etc. But the end result was absolutely remarkable: an immersive game like no other on the 6th generation.

Could have all this effort, investment, time-consuming and thorough work been done on a made-up city with made-up vehicles and made-up characters with made-up lives and made-up voices? Sure. Would it be likely to happen? Of course not. The motivation to avoid effort or time or money spending when such resources become painfully expensive is too big when there is an easy alternative to disguise them as "different artistic options".

Nintendo doesn't need to go out of their comfort zone. There are still plenty of "objective quality filters" that doesn't involve realism. Fully-editable levels, like LittleBigPlanet has, perfectly fits on the criteria mentioned above. Thousands of km2, like Fuel has, is another. But the point is that Nintendo has very little to show on here. Like the OP says, they have always avoided what is massive money spending, monsters of uncontrolled quality, bold concepts that could become state-of-the-art achievements. Nintendo games are nothing more than small and conventional fun experiences that can only be praised on a subjective analysis. Objectively, they are a nullity.

Not my criteria. As I said earlier, I disregard my tastes or the tastes of anybody else when talking about quality in a forum full of different people that have different perceptions of quality. Instead, I use objective criteria (universal truth) not to assess quality but to try to estimate it. You may find it good or bad, but it is indeed an estimation based on facts, not tastes. And even if you don't connect commitment to quality, that's fine, don't call it quality, call it commitment. The section 1.2 of the OP shows how commited Nintendo has been along the time.

Nintendo has been always in a low risky mood regardless their losses or astronomical profits. This has more to do with a company's mindset than with its profits. A profitable company may naturally engage into big projects and today there's already many ways to control the risk of a game to become a flop. What that section of the OP criticizes is the attitude of a company that makes huge profits, doesn't engage into major risks, doesn't evolve like the others do, and see its profits to go from huge to astronomical while keeping a significant part (if not most) of it on its pockets.

I reply to you what I wrote to PenguinZ:

"Realism is not the keyword here. Commitment, deepness are more like it. This is a very hard thing to explain but I will do my best.

As a fan of videogaming, what matters to me is that this industry produces high-quality games. That's what really matters. But quality is about how much a game is appreciated by each person. Then, it varies from gamer to gamer, because it is about tastes. Talking about tastes is going around in circles, it's not possible to argue on this field. What is awesome to someone may be awful to another (and even if it isn't so, one can say it is without having to prove anything, "it's just about my tastes", he/she could say). So, we only have 2 options if we want to debate quality: either we say it's only about tastes, each person has his own, end of the story, let's go out of this forum ; or we remove tastes from the equation and see what's left.

For those that stay on the "quality" debate, that's the big question: what's left? In my opinion, what's left is the commitment of each dev (effort/time/money) shown on measurable (objectivity) remarkable (relevance) achievements. Once it's measurable, it's not about subjectivity anymore and thus is give us a commong ground to debate. Once it's remarkable, it proves it is related to quality. Once it requires effort/time/money, it proves it is rare (only few are willing to spend so much resources) and thus it's valuable. Therefore, any achievement one can find that fits into this criteria is proof of commitment to work towards quality. Is this a perfect criteria? Not at all. Is this a good quality filter? Absolutely.

Realism is not really necessary. A made-up city may have required as much work as a realistic one. However, it is much easier to assess commitment on realistic games, once any deviation from reality means lack of effort. On the other hand, any lack of effort on the creation of a made-up city may be seen as an artistic option. The lack of effort is disguised here. An exellent example on how realism promotes effort is The Getaway:

- They have recreated the modern London. It's one of the very few sandbox games (if not the only one) that has recreated in 3D a real modern city. They had to buy cinematic equipment to capture every inch of every street to afterwards design it in 3D. They ended up skipping many streets and anyone can easily perceive that lack of effort. Yet, that small and truncated sample of London became a unique asset of the whole industry (as far as I know, there isn't out there any better recreation of a modern city). This achievement showed a great commitment from Team Soho and is one of the greatest software benchmarks that magnifies videogaming and imposes some respect to those that despise it.

- They have recreated real cars and real characters. Once more, they had to buy equipment that would let them capture and render those cars and characters. They were pioneers (the first or one of the first) in the movement capture of the bodies and facial expressions. They got to know real people with real lifes that were similar to the ones of the characters from the game. For example, to play the character of a boxer that was also a gangster they recruited a boxer that was also a gangster. To play the character of a high-profile business man, they convinced a real high-profile business man to enter in the project. Etc. These real people were rendered to the game, did all the action scenes to capture their movements and did their own voices too. This whole process demanded a lot of time, interviews, cinematic preparation, performances, etc. But the end result was absolutely remarkable: an immersive game like no other on the 6th generation.

Could have all this effort, investment, time-consuming and thorough work been done on a made-up city with made-up vehicles and made-up characters with made-up lives and made-up voices? Sure. Would it be likely to happen? Of course not. The motivation to avoid effort or time or money spending when such resources become painfully expensive is too big when there is an easy alternative to disguise them as "different artistic options".

Nintendo doesn't need to go out of their comfort zone. There are still plenty of "objective quality filters" that doesn't involve realism. Fully-editable levels, like LittleBigPlanet has, perfectly fits on the criteria mentioned above. Thousands of km2, like Fuel has, is another. But the point is that Nintendo has very little to show on here. Like the OP says, they have always avoided what is massive money spending, monsters of uncontrolled quality, bold concepts that could become state-of-the-art achievements. Nintendo games are nothing more than small and conventional fun experiences that can only be praised on a subjective analysis. Objectively, they are a nullity."

Following pure supply/demand logic, the games should in fact drop the price like Sony and Microsoft do. Is that disrespecting the customers? I don't think so. Each gamer can make his/her own trade-off: pay more or wait more. What Nintendo does is being stubborn in an attempt to blackmail gamers in the long-term. They are the ones that are wrong and acting in bad faith. I find Sony's and Microsoft's consoles not only better but also more affordable considering the whole investment (console +  games + accessories). Anyone willing to wait will find that too.

Like I said to other user, when they had the opportunity X, they did Y. Now that they don't have X anymore, they can't do Y. But it doesn't mean they wouldn't like to if they had the chance again.

There are other ways to fight piracy without harming who's not guilty at all.

@bolded: The foundation of your objective argument is your subjective opinon and your list of objective criteria is subjectively chosen.

@underlined: If we assume the statement to be true, then logically, there exists quality games that don't meet the criteria. In other words, the criteria may filter for quality games, but the games filtered out aren't certain to be poor (see denying the antecedent).

The requirements are objectively chosen (and anyone can freely add more as long as they meet the criteria) but the foundation of the criteria is indeed subjective. Yet, I'm open to other views. And, although other views may be legitimate, mine is too. In other words, they could be different routes to get to different quality games. My route definitely leaves quality games filtered out, you're right. And other routes could catch them. However, I'm not seeing those other routes. Be my guest to show me any.

Nevertheless, it's just odd that Nintendo performs so badly on my criteria. But then, if we start to connect the dots, we realize it's not that odd. The way Nintendo got clinged to old concepts, the way they lagged behind on the generations, the way they shifted their focus to a less demanding audience (kids), the astronomical profits they made and the obscene ROI they got...there are too many facts pointing out to the same conclusion: Nintendo is not committed to quality.