Doesn't change the fact that their home console division declined steeply from the NES-SNES to the Gamecube.

I exagerrated saying Nintendo is anti-3rd party, but they're certainly not at all a priority for Nintendo. Sure Nintendo has tried to attract 3rd parties, but at the end of the day they don't let 3rd party developers dictate Nintendo's business and how Nintendo's next console should be, unlike Sony & Microsoft. If Nintendo did care that much about 3rd party developers, they wouldn't have made the Wii, Wii U and Switch as underpowered as they were.

Actually it's the same division. All the teams were making games for handhelds and home consoles. I think the problem with Yamauchi was delayed product launches because of earlier product's success - NES was doing so good that there was no need for it's successor, so Megadrive had two years headstart from SNES. Eventually SNES was dominant in the market, so Nintendo did not have to hurry N64 to the market, so it was delayed due to Miyamoto procrastinating with Super Mario 64, so Sony had quite a headstart. Gameboy was supposed to have a successor already in 1996, but due to it's dominant position on the market, we did not have it until 2001 with GBA.

Iwata, on the other hand, understood the importance of early launches and this was Sony's strategy aswell.

I don't know about Microsoft, But I don't think Sony lets third parties dictate their hardware development. The PlayStation Vita, 4, and 5 were primarily developed with the involvement of Sony's first party teams before any third parties got involved. And it's not like Nintendo hasn't taken input from third parties either when developing consoles. Nintendo increased the RAM of the Switch to 4 GB (from the planned 2-3) purely because Capcom wanted to use the RE Engine on it.

Actually that wasn't how Nintendo was run back then. In the Yamauchi days, Divisions of the company operated in Silos and rarely interacted with each-other, and often had bitter rivalries. EAD was putting all their weight behind the GameCube (With a few exceptions, they were effectively the only NCL department supporting it) while they gave the GameBoy Advance outsourced token games (Mario Kart Super Circuit being primarily developed by Intelligent Systems for example). Everybody else at Nintendo, including R&D1, R&D2, and NCL's Licensing department were left to prop up the GBA.

When Iwata came in, he massively restructured the company into two game divisions (EAD and SPD), that supported handheld and consoles equally.

When Iwata came to the company, it was at a time Nintendo needed to react to the existing situation. Gamecube was for survival to stay relevant in the business and with PSP on the way, Nintendo needed to react to the threat it posed to Gameboy line. It might be that 3DS and Wii U were just using the existing strong brands to play time before the next move. 3DS was able to play Vita out of the market, so why not Wii U could do the same in home consoles.

Exactly. He was really good at quickly determining what Nintendo as a brand needed to be in the moment. But I feel he struggled to plan for the future after he achieved success with the Wii and DS. Keep in mind, the 3DS struggled during its first year, as Nintendo was banking on the strength of the Nintendo DS brand and the appeal of 3D to make it a hit. When that obviously didn't work, Iwata cut the price of the console only five months into its life, give everybody who bought it early an apology package of free software, and took a huge paycut to avoid laying off his staff.

There's also time before Gamecube. Since GC was dead on arrival, Nintendo's focus was where it's money was. Rivalry is actually a good thing because this way your product already competes befaro releasing it in the market to compete with your competitors. May explain why the quality of Nintendo's games was so incredibly good during the Yamauchi era.

Actually Sony has listened 3rd parties quite a lot - atleast since the PS3, that must have been a pain for the developers to do anything meaningful, so the PS4 was designed as easy as possible for 3rd parties to port/co-develop their PC games to, then again, Wii was the cheapest to develop games on out of the three of it's generation. Also Xbox 360 did quite good relative to PS3, so MS did pose a threat to Sony, as you could use Microsoft APIs in development for Windows as well as the next Xbox. If PS3 had been as dominant as PS2 was, PS3 strategy - that made it a pain to port PS3 games to other platforms - would have been a perfect strategy.

The paycut Iwata took is kind of a tradition in Japan when company is doing badly. Not to avoid layoffs - then again, avoiding layoffs is also a tradition in Japan, which is why Howard Stringer was hired as a CEO to restructure Sony and lay staff off back in the day. And once it was done, Sony got again a Japanese CEO.

I agree that Iwata looks reactive rather than proactive. 3DS was his idea and it did manage to drive Sony off of handhelds, which makes Iwata successful in what he did. 3D was trending at the time 3DS released, so it could have been disruptive to Sony's 3D plans for Playstation, but 3D as a misstep overall. 2DS and New 2DS are pretty good producs, and in my opinion, what the 3DS should have been right out of the gate. Then again, Switch, using the Nintendo accounts for future and focusing development resources on one device was Iwata's idea.

But that also came with the caveat of rewarding the most successful team, while paying less attention to the underlings. You can see this as early as the Nintendo 64 era, where EAD and Miyamoto effectively had a monopoly on first party development for the console, while R&D1 and R&D2 were off supporting the Game Boy Color.

And when the N64 wasn't getting enough third party support, Yamauchi's plan was to basically throw money at the problem by making a bunch of confusing startups and deals (Marigul, Q-Fund, etc.) in hopes that they could release something on the system.

Iwata had to clean up a lot of that mess by restructuring EAD into multiple sub-departments to make it less Miyamoto-centric, and created SPD for smaller internal development and out-house productions, with plenty of money and freedom to create or seek out games that were just as good as anything Miyamoto's gang could make (SPD was responsible for half of Nintendo's best games during the Iwata years). He also had the task of trying to fix up all the third party bridges that Yamauchi burned during the N64 days, and it wouldn't take until the Nintendo Switch to fully repair nearly all of them.

Sony listened to third parties a lot with PS4, but they also listened to what their teams at Worldwide Studios wanted as well. The PlayStation 3 was developed completely in secret not just from third parties, but also Sony's own developers, which is a large reason why the console was notoriously difficult develop for. The PS4 was Sony essentially taking lessons from Nintendo in regards to integrating its own game developers into the hardware development process. They also took some ques from the DS and Wii in making the PS4 as accessible and affordable to develop for as possible, which is hugely important to Indies.

I wasn't referring to their software teams but rather the home console component of their business, which saw both great success under Yamauchi but also a significant decline and loss of market leadership.

Agreed on the launches, though these didn't always go to plan under Iwata either as both 3DS and Wii U launched without enough software ready.