This sounds pretty damn similar to what they did in the past so I'm not as concerned as I was at first. I honestly wonder if Nintendo could have said nothing about any change to their typical E3 procedures if anyone would have noticed a damn thing. Originally it sounded like Nintendo was dodging E3.
it was horribly missed in translation tbh
No, it was people just over-reacting. It was nothing to do with translation. Here is Iwata's original comment (made in Japanese and translated to English):
We decided not to host a large-scale presentation targeted at everyone in the international audience where we announce new information as we did in the past," Iwata said. "Instead, at the E3 show this year,
we are planning to host a few smaller events that are specifically focused on our software lineup for the U.S. market.
There will be one closed event for American distributors, and we will hold another closed hands-on experience event, for mainly the Western gaming media.So people just over-reacted for no reason.