Nintendo's foolishness has bitten back hard but what does the future hold for the fallen king of consoles?

It’s tough to explain how Nintendo managed to get everything wrong with the Wii U but Wii U – the inside story certainly sheds some light on a few things. Although the article does raise several interesting points, I would like to focus on one specific quote from this article:

At some point in this conversation we were informed that it was no good referencing [Xbox] Live and PSN [PlayStation Network] as nobody in their development teams used those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them?

For me that explains everything. The reason why Nintendo screwed up so badly was because they had no idea about the quality of their rivals. I’ve recently written about how poorly the Nintendo eShop compares to rival stores and often expressed frustration that Nintendo had learnt nothing from the success of their rivals. Well now we know why, they just didn’t understand the necessity of online infrastructure because they had no idea how developed the competition’s online infrastructure was.

It’s hard to believe this was the beginning of Ninteno’s downfall

Completely clueless

It’s hard to imagine how anybody in Nintendo, let alone those on the development team could have totally ignored the competition around them but it seems that they have. On the other hand, the competition seems to be well aware of what other companies are up to. Xbox’s Phil Spencer is praised the PS4 for its comittment to new intellectual property and stating that Sony has done “a nice job with PS4”.

Even when Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida mentions in an interview with IGN that he has two Wii Us which he plays with his daughters and goes on to state that he “think[s] Nintendo and [Sony] are pretty much in the same group, and we need Nintendo to be very successful,” Nintendo remains silent because apparently they haven’t got a clue what’s going on outside their own company.

How has this happened?

We are never going to know for certain how Nintendo became so isolated from the rest of the industry but I think Iwata, the President and CEO of Nintendo, gave us a clue in his Oct.2013 speech at the B Dash Camp startup conference in Osaka.

When we talk about Nintendo we cannot ignore (former president) Hiroshi Yamauchi who just recently passed away. He always said that if you have failure, you don’t need to be too concerned. You always have good things and bad, and this reflects the history of Nintendo. If you do the same thing as others, it will wear you out. Nintendo is not good at competing so we always have to challenge [the status quo] by making something new, rather than competing in an existing market.