Before amiibo this stuff was awesome bonus content. Now you have to buy costumes individually for $13 apiece... if you can even get your hands on them.

It's just dumb. Clearly it's a great business decision for them. But they made a very small amount of cool bonus content for Mario Kart 8 and sheltered it away behind an over $100 paywall. Yeah, it's great that if you already bought an amiibo you get a costume for owning it. But those costumes are the sort of thing that feel like they ought to have been in the game anyway, as regular unlockable extras.

This is the post-amiibo world:

stuff that would have been included in the game a year ago.

pretty much. ms was smart enough to sell kinect seperately, but ninty's not smart enough to sell the tablet seperately. if not for the giant tablet controller, the thing would be $250 or less and flying off shelves. 

They forgot how to print money.

But in all seriousness, I think Nintendo learned not to use their previous brands' name, not make their systems super expensive (3DS), and not implement a gimmick if they're not gonna use it themselves.

Other than that? Probably not much.

All of them! I hope they they learnt every lesson that they could have learnt!

IMO Amiibo is the only thing they've done right this gen. If they are able to give customers what they want and at a sensible price they've learnt. I don't expect them to learn when it comes to hardware or 3rd party relations. Heres hoping they get better marketing.

1-The time it takes to develop HD games was more than they thought (apparent from game droughts)
2-Console specs matter (apparent from the revised 3DS)
3-Digital sales are a thing (apparent from slightly better online store)
4-Online does matter (apparent from having more games with online components)
5-Third parties matter (apparent from consumer backlash)

Id list more but i dont think it has gone through their thick heads yet.

I'm not sure they've learned anything meaningful, unfortunately. But from their own statements I think we can assume a few things: Wii U was a dumb and confusing name, and that their advertising was unsuccessful to convey that they had a NEW console out. They might also realise that they can't support two consoles at the same time alone, they will therefore unify their new HW with a unified OS. Whether or not this means shared games or not remain to be seen, but porting will most likely much easier. This might also mean that they understand that they need good 3rd party support.

I don't think we can expect much more than this from Nintendo. This is all based on statements coming from Iwata and Reggie.

Unfortunately, I fear they will learn little.

They'll still use withered technology.

They'll still refuse to listen to the demands of the Western market.

They'll still fail to tap into the crucial dudebro demographic.

As a result, they still won't sell all that great. I'd love to be wrong, but I'm convinced they are too deep in denial to get with the program.

I do wonder though, especially if Sony exists the portable handheld market, whether or not at least on the portable side they may feel like the time is right to return to a more cutting edge approach?

More like how they were back in the day with the Nintendo 64? All you heard about that back in the day was it's incredible Terminator 2/Jurassic Park SGI graphics, DOOM 64, Turok, Star Wars, etc. they really actually did bank on a pretty core audience for that early on.

Because right now, the casual/kid friendly side is really being cannibalized by tablets/smartphones, especially if Nintendo wants to maintain the $30-$40 software model, they may actually realize that the "bluer ocean" for handhelds may be a more hardcore device that really drives home the "you can't get this on your tablet" point home. 

That and marketing on Better Call Saul/Walking Dead for the N3DS launch kinda made me go "hmmm". Why the sudden interest in marketing towards adults? Testing the waters for something in the future, perhaps? 

Also interesting for the first time since like N64/early GCN days they made it a point to talk about system horsepower with the N3DS ads. Hmmm again. 

But nah I'm probably wrong. Nintendo probably doesn't have it in them to leave their "aim for kids first" safety blanket behind.

I don't see how Amiibo is worse than Skylanders, Amiibo is completely optional for each and every game they are compatible with. On the other hand Skylanders figurines are required to play the game and if u want to unlock all the characters then u need to spend $100's.

I don't have any Amiibo yet and I'm not likely to buy any, but u still get a full game whether or not u own them, with Skylanders/Disney Infinity u get part of a game unless u buy multiple figurines.