There's a lot of blood in the air and calls for the beheading of current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, by bloodthirsty analysts, armchair mercenaries and console warriors. It's like a feeding frenzy happening over Nintendo right now, but Iwata won't play the bait or the prey this time around.
According to an aggregated news post from Nintendo Enthusiast based on a report from Japanese outlet Nikkei, Iwata has come forward to acknowledge his mistakes in the business ventures of Nintendo throughout the first half of 2013, but also acknowledged that he would be staying on-board to correct Nintendo's path.
The short post also makes it known that Iwata has no current plans to resign from his position of running the Big 'N', and will continue to trod through the thicket to the green pastures by rekindling the company's momentum (or more like, keeping what momentum they gained from the holiday season) and making headway toward more positive sales figures and a return to profit throughout 2014.
Recently, the call for Iwata's resignation came from Nintendo's latest sales figures, which was basically a recount of their 2013 performance. The performance wasn't so great. However, a lot of Nintendo's stumbling blocks weren't there because of their poor decision making, but a lot of it was due to the fact that they got screwed over by supposed publishing partners.
While Iwata and crew are taking a heck of a lot of flak for their downturn in profit throughout 2013 due to a dearth of sales in the first half of the year, the only thing they can really be blamed for is not being more proactive with having contingencies in case third-party publishers did exactly what they did.
Nintendo has been in this position many times before and have pulled through (their GameCube era was probably their worst). However, the Wii U is definitely shaping up to have a bevy selection of games to propel it beyond the lifetime sales of the GameCube if the titles consistently roll out in a timely manner and Nintendo continues to promote and market the Wii U properly, something they explicitly mentioned they would do throughout 2014.
Other than not foreseeing the backstab by major publishers like Electronic Arts throughout the first year of the Wii U's lifespan, Iwata has been taking the company in many of the right directions, being responsible for huge successes like the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and the original Wii. Let's not forget that each of those devices received massive media backlash before (and after) they released, but still went on to become top selling dedicated gaming devices, with Nintendo's handhelds outselling Sony's offerings by embarrassing degrees. Do I even need to bring up the Wii? Well, despite being loaded with shovelware, it still kicked the butts of both the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Calling for the death of Nintendo because they didn't have a strong enough line-up of software for two-and-a-half quarters where they expected to receive stronger third-party support is juvenile and silly. Nintendo's mistake was in trusting others to help them do the job they do best. It's a far more forgivable thing than Microsoft's attempt to completely close out and nearly lockdown their entire console market with anti-consumer DRM. I mean, by comparison the media sure is soft on Microsoft.
However, Nintendo is now out of the excuse zone. They've buckled down the hatchet with a lot of indie support, they've opened up communication with developers, they've lined up 2014 with a lot of hard hitters and they're getting serious about sales and marketing. If they screw up 2014 they won't have anyone but themselves to blame, but I tend to doubt that Iwata will want to stand in the loser's circle when the fiscal results rear its head.
Now show them how a boss does it, Iwata.
