Oh, could you tell me more about the bold part (Project Sora management)? Never heard about this, must be interesting!
It's sad that Itagaki buried himself that much. He's very good and his games have a really good thing, it's all about mechanics, impact - even if they are not very polished. Nothing compares to Ninja Gaiden [1,2] or DoA [2,4] and the recent iterations don't have that "Itagaki feeling".
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=43147626&postcount=91
Shikimaru Ninja said:
Managing a studio, producing and directing games was way beyond Masahiro Sakurai. Sakurai's wife helped him managed the studio as well, but it just wasn't enough. Specifically procuring and hiring talent became arduous for Sakurai. Basically he was never able to assemble an internal staff capable of developing a game on its own. For Smash Bros. Brawl and Kid Icarus, they only we able to hire about 20-50% of the necessary staff required for a Wii-3DS game. Nintendo had to subcontract several companies for each game to reach development. Again, they tried to hire staff for the Smash HD-3DS project, and they just gave up, liquidated the subsidiary, and hired Namco-Bandai to do the intial labor. Three strikes and you are out.
Iwata wanted Sakurai to join EAD Tokyo from the beginning. Have management run the studio, and just have Sakurai focus on producing or directing the games. Sakurai initially refused.
Also...
I like to think that people would be okay with this and even be more understanding if Nintendo communicated this better and more consistently in a way that's viewable by all. Communication has always been my biggest issue with Nintendo. Nintendo Directs have helped but they are largely Japan focused. There is no significant western presence in a way by comparison. However I'm not sure who is to blame for that. NCL or NoA/NoE (who have largely focused on twitter and facebook while wasting their websites (the first thing anyone goes to) as a method of interaction).
I'll only speak for myself and what interaction I have with NoA, but I honestly have to say the quality of folks that NoA has is terrible... the vast majority of great managers they had jumped ship to Microsoft ~10+ years ago or to other tech companies like Apple even... NoA tried to open up regional offices in SF and NYC to try and bring back good marketing people after Perrin Kaplan left, but overall they've just been terrible at attracting good people on the business side, and much of it comes down to the fact that up and coming marketing and sales folks see no future at the company... part of it is the incestuous culture they've developed... a bunch of 40 to 50-something dudebros who know little about hardcore Nintendo fans and more generally gaming culture and have stuck around for YEARS despite their complete inability to do anything - often blaming NCL for their laziness...
People who have no idea about anything happening at NoA keep saying it's "Japan! They won't let the Americans do what they want" - that's totally absurd! NCL is
WAY too busy to bother micro managing the bureaucracy at NoA... they have a pretty hands-off approach to the local market and pretty much leave it up to NoA to decide what to bring over, localization, etc - and Yamauchi famously wanted more devolution of power so that younger American executives at NoA could make decisions on their own (read the BusinessWeek article in the OP)...
TBH I don't think NCL wants to send a bunch of Japanese people to NoA to try and run things... At the same time they keep thinking hiring one or two really good leaders will solve the problem... People like Reggie have tried to make inroads into the Nintendo gaming culture in America... but at the end of the day they aren't really gamers and the personas they take on are more a mockery of Nintendo fans than anything else... It's frankly a little embarrassing...
If I were NCL, I would restructure NoA's mandate, and get them to focus on the following with specific milestones for each
1. All marketing and localization (which they already do) - but set targets to maximize content discovery and breadth/depth in as many channels as possible - stop relying on the Wal Mart / Gamestop crutch
2. Talent - NoA does a terrible job helping to find and procure talent - outside of Digipen, they pretty much have no active presence to find and recruit developers for NST or Retro - they pretty much just expect developers to find websites... meanwhile other game devs are swarming technical talent at the top schools (Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, UT, Urbana Champaign, Olin Engineering) and great design and art schools, and getting them on board as well as going to GDC and other conferences to find experienced development talent... Retro and NST don't have the resources to do these large scale recruiting efforts on their own so NOA needs to take a lead if they intend to ramp up the studios to get 5-6 high quality games a generation...
3. Developer/Publisher relations -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE (disturbing, I know) - NoA pretty much continues to drop the ball here - they are mostly absent in these discussions and it really affects the marketing potential of Nintendo products as well - their Indie discussions are getting better - but still overall incredibly poor and that's because they don't have engineers but corporate shills trying to do this stuff
4. Other Software - OS, UX, dev kits, etc - It's absurd that Nintendo is hiring Japanese software engineers to do this - and it's absurd that the best NoA can do is license existing software for TVii - they need their own software teams thinking about apps, etc. There are plenty of people they can poach from MSFT and plenty of enterprise software folks in Texas they could pick up and locate in Austin - they just need to try
5. I'd also shake up the organization from the bottom up by developing young people out of college or early in their career - similar to Google's APM (Associate Product Manager) program that Marissa Meyer started and is now the most lucrative post-college entry level job in Silicon Valley
I guarantee NoA will change fundamentally if they could just do a few of these things well
I always found it humourous that the fact that the GameCube, despite having a stellar library in certain circumstances depending upon who you ask, was their weakest console of all time. It was after that period and during the life of the GBA where an outreach for Japanese third party deals began to spread. Some might even argue it was happening during the GameCube's life, what with F-Zero GX and the like. Was it mere coincidence that this level of talk and development was beginning to take place after Yamauchi had stepped down, and the whole thing all seemingly ramped up after he left the board? I'll let the armchair analysts speculate over that one.
Nintendo had really good relationships with third parties in America during the GC and they really made a lot of in roads in Japan - Yamauchi was the reason for that as he funded a lot of independent development studios with his own cash and took in refugee developers from other studios (*cough*Square*cough*)... Sony had a tyrant-like grip during the PS2, so a lot of the key IP stayed on the PS2 - but with the exploding popularity of the DS and the decline of the Japanese console market - Japanese developers warmed up to Nintendo's profit machine (low dev costs, high user base)
For this reason, I really think people don't know WTF they are talking about in terms of Yamauchi when they bash the man sometimes - yes the man was eccentric, but he was immensely respected - he took the risks that ensured the games market in Japan survived - and he kept everyone - yes even the great NAMCO - on an equal playing field - he believed talent was all that mattered and had zero tolerance for entitlement - one of the reasons smaller game developers emerged was precisely because Yamauchi advocated such an equal playing field - do you think a small studio like Square would have emerged during the PS2 life cycle given all the preferential treatment Sony gave to large publishers?
The DS was Yamauchi's idea as was the target demographics for it (new gamers), and the reason he hand-picked Iwata was because Iwata was the closest thing to a younger Yamauchi (Iwata made a bunch of the planning decisions on Gamecube) - the one thing Iwata added to the mix was the fact that he himself was a developer and gamer - which allowed him to connect personally with talent that was fleeing from established studios - and the dividends are being paid as EAD Tokyo and Nintendo's partnerships have proven
Iwata knows western third parties are badly burned by Yamauchi and its gonna take baby steps to regain the trust
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