Since the moment Nintendo started to offering "premium" versions and increased the original price of Switch online. What was supposed to be a low cost service to cover servers and infrastructure turned to be another money revenue, going as far as limiting release of digital ports (with Pokemon being so far the only exception) as an incentive to lock users inside a fixed subscription 

Let's just be intellectually honest for once: If the point of Nintendo online was not to generate revenue then it would be free

The rant abou Wii U being focused on power is a misconception. It wasn't. It was indeed relatively underpowered and above average price tag relative to its power due to the controller. The graphics of Wii U had a big leap mostly because at this point Nintendo needed to learn how to develop HD games, but the focus even on Wii U games were not graphics either 

In fact I fail to understand what's different on Nintendo 2026 compared to 2012 in terms of software development. It's the same Nintendo in my eyes. The changes has been primarily in sales and marketing, not software development 

Needless to say, Furakawa knows jack shit about gaming development and focus mostly on finance, accounting, marketing and branding 

Hit and miss has the miss part as well. I don't like cherry picking myself, but to each their own.

I dont think that is confirmed. The guy left to form his own studio. According to Nintendo he was never blamed for the failure of the VB. They could be lying, but there dont seem to be any evidence of that. Unless you have a source for this?

I'll have to disagree simply because Switch was conceived during Iwata's time. We don't have enough projects under Furukawa to judge him fairly.

And although Yamauchi led Nintendo during its most creative period, my favorite is still Iwata for all the contributions and vision for turning around the company at its toughest moments.

I think Yokoi leaving to form a competitor system to the GameBoy so as to challenge their “power over ‘Blue Ocean’” Project Atlantis is strong evidence. DYKG made a fantastic documentary, so you may want to check out whatever sources he cites.

Well he was always a hardware guy. Would be weird if he left to start a company that makes ice cream. Also it was Bandai he made the WonderSwan for, so you could say they were the ones that challenged Nintendo. Also Yokoi was probably a very sought after guy by other companies in the industry after leaving Nintendo. The guy had already achieved so much by then. 

I think its just as easy to think he left on his own than being forced out or fired is all Im saying really. We may never know for sure.

Nintendo’s been doing this “premium” edition all the way back since the GBA, with their ports and remasters of NES/SNES releases at $20-40USD a pop. Same with “New Motion Plus” on Wii.

Nintendo hasn’t done a price hike on NSOnline. There’s one coming in JP but that’s it (and that’s only after having exhausted the route of using software to cover increasing production costs).

Nintendo has only done two limited edition re-releases (Fire Emblem & Mario 3D All Stars) during FY21. Never happened again.

I know Wii U was underpowered compared to the competition, that goes without even saying. All Wii U was, however, was Wii HD packed with an expensive accessory. That’d be like packing in a PSPortal with PlayStation 5 and calling it innovation.

If you think the software pipeline is no different today than the Wii/Wii U period, then you haven’t been in the Nintendo ecosystem these past 15 years. Wii U didn’t even get a Zelda, there was one Mario sports on home consoles during Wii U and Wii was a massive step back from GCN. There wss no Fire Emblem nor Mario Party releasing every three years, the Wii didn’t get a Pikmin game, and you’d never see anything like Emio nor Endless Ocean drop on Wii U.

I make a comparison with Apple:
Apple with Steve Jobs = Nintendo with Satoru Iwata
Apple with Tim Cook = Nintendo with Shuntaro Furukawa

One had/supported creative ideas and wanted to push the company forwards, and the other is a business guy who sells old ideas with a new label and mainly cares about profit.

Sorry not entirely true comparisons.  Mr. Hiroshi Yamauchi is actually more like Steve Jobs. He took the card maker and a struggling business entity to become a corporate entity. He was basically a founder of new Nintendo. Mr. Iwata visions didn't last long. Successors to Wii and DS underperformed and lacked modern approach to hardware. Iwata San was mainly a developer, not a hardware engineer. The products created during his leadership were lacking in terms of sophistication. They were very unsatisfying for millennials like me. He is more like current CEOs of Google or Microsoft. A great leader, but not trying to push the company into new frontier.

From the business standpoint and as a person I really respect Iwata San, but Nintendo needs an engineer to take over. The sooner the better, as people who will keep buying Nintendo products are gonna be millennials. They gotta push out more sophisticated hardware and software, but hardware must be more capable for sure. If not they will lose the market share after Switch 2.

Iwata was a nice person and personable in things like Directs, but the Yamauchi and Furukawa eras are better IMO.

The Wii was an enormous rip off, it was a repackaged GameCube with a different $30 controller modestly upclocked with a bit more RAM for 2.5x (!) the cost and people act like Nintendo did them a favor, lol.

The Yamauchi era hardware was far better, NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, and now the Furukawa era kinda starts with Switch OLED and Switch 2 and both are very nice and feel premium. You feel like you are getting your money's worth and not getting a toy either. 

The game quality too, honestly I don't miss the days of like Wii Fit or Wii Music being the "big" release for the entire year and the main focus of their E3/June Directs.

Sorry but you'd have to pay me to go back to that. I'm loving playing big ticket 3rd party games again on Switch 2 like Resident Evil 9 and Indiana Jones because the hardware is actually well made and has some real horsepower under the hood.

The DS was not Iwata's idea either, Yamauchi insisted on a 2 screen portable to which Iwata and the head of the Game Boy thought it was a dumb idea but they had to humor him because he was Yamauchi.

I wish Furukawa era Nintendo was a little more open in sharing things about future game releases, but it's fine. Seeing a game like Star Fox and being able to play it within a couple of months is not bad either.