LOL, I think he is still bitter about Wii Music...

JINX!

What the hell? of all the things he could have complained about, he chose one that makes the least sense?

LBP will be huge!

Link? I would like to read it myself before making a judgment.

He made that statement (or something similar) in his blog. He attributed the failure of Wii Music to Miyamoto's embrace of User Generated Content. (http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/momentum/).

Here is the link the to the article cited in the OP: http://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/the-source-of-anti-content/

Basically, Malstrom has a vision. Now that what Nintendo is doing -- rightly or wrongly -- does not conform to Malstrom's opinion -- he has joined the chorus of doubters.

However, it should be noted that Nintendo made record profits last year and Malstrom -- whom I have defeneded in the past and may yet be proven right -- appears to be someone who has blogs about what believes is the one true way.

Mike from Morgantown

He's had this "Nintendo is doomed" idea before. He thinks they're starting to get complacent, but he's addressing it from a different perspective than most. He thinks that the proper future for Nintendo is to continue to incorporate motion controls to become more and more involved (since it was he who pioneered the idea of "upstreaming,"), which is why he's been disappointed in that Nintendo seems to be branching out in directions of safer development.

Heh. Contrary to what you've heard from others, Malstrom's not really a Nintendo fanboy: he's criticized them before for lots of things (this is hardly the first time he's beat the user-generated content drum either). I'll read the post more, but from what's been posted, this stance is nothing new.

 Malstrom's stance is that any company that relies on user-generated content is arrogant, because they're essentially telling the consumer to create the game. He analogizes it to writers selling blank books and the like.

As to why user-generated content is bad, he boils it down to two reasons: first, the consumer who creates the content is not going to retain any legal rights or royalties from his works (as far as I know, the only times such has happened is when Valve buys a Half-Life mod). Second, and more importantly, people don't pay $50+ for amateur content, almost iuniversally of poor quality which is what this stuff is. They pay for good, professional content, because in theory that's the best kind, indeed, it's the only kind worth paying for.

Note that I'm not completely with Malstrom on this one.

 He actually draws a distinction between user-generated content and merely having a level editor. Brawl (and Starcraft) are two examples he's used of the latter: there's already a crap-load of professional content packed into the games: if no one ever used the level editors, the games would still be of very high quality. By contrast, games like Spore and Wii Music need the consumer to create the content. A fine line, sure, and again I'm not sure I 100% agree, but I can see the distinction.

 You echo my thoughts. Wii Music had user-generated content. Mario Paint back in the day was the same. Wario Ware DIY is coming soon. I'm sure there are a few others that I can't think of right now throughout the decades that also relied on it. But they are few and far between. Again, I'll have to read the article to see if he's said something new, but I suspect he's putting the blame almost exclusively on Wii Music, as it DID kill the system's momentum (according to no less an authority than Iwata).

 Yes, but it's also declining steadily.

 I think you have the right of it. I admire Malstrom's confidence, and he's been right on the money several times where most were not, but he seems to lack any sense of self-doubt.

I've always found there to be something ironic about Malstrom at the base level: he worships wealth and the wealthy, and he's doing all this to learn how to become wealthy himself, and yet it seems that for all his desire and bluster, he remains a mere salesman with a law degree and a serious case of envy, rather than one of the obscenely wealthy businessmen whose ranks he so fervently wishes to join.

I don't mean that as an ad-hominem attack, and I may well be wrong, but for what it's worth that's the impression I've gotten over the past year.

The crux of it is that there's a limited market of people who actually want to create things. Most people just want to consume things.

Even though there's a lot of excitement about giving customers tool sets to create their own content and share it with friends, no game which revolves around such creative tools has achieved mega-hit status. At best, such tools should be treated as a bonus feature, like in Halo 3, and not a focal point of the game.

wasn't excitebike user generated content?
what's wrong with it?