Jubenhimer
Member
I mean, just... what happened with Nintendo's executive culture? I've been assuming for four years that they were humble and in freak-out mode and realized in retrospect how massively they'd fucked up, and they were asking themselves questions like "How did we produce so much hardware and software that's totally unappealing? What can we do to apologize to our fans and make it up to them? How can we completely change and update our whole way of thinking to match the needs and desires of 2017 gamers? How can we use our war chest to deliver a huge amount of appealing software cheap and win back market share?"
But everything about yesterday suggests that they learned absolutely none of those lessons. It suggests that they have an insular executive culture of back-patting and mutual reinforcement, like George Lucas surrounded by his sycophants or something. They seem to really believe that the Wii and DS are the norm and the Wii U the exception, despite all evidence to the contrary. They seem to think their whole way of thinking is fundamentally correct, that their products are just the best, and that the Wii U's failure is... a fluke? Somebody else's fault? Anything but a sign that their entire approach to video games is fundamentally broken.
It's hilarious looking back on this. If the Switch has taught us anything, its that people still want Nintendo. Not just their games, they still want the Nintendo style. They still want the Nintendo way of thinking, and they still want the Nintendo-like approach to hardware. They just didn't want a Wii U. So the Switch's success completely vindicates Nintendo in this regard.