yet Nintendo did not take the opportunity to deliver the Final Blow with a better lineup of games.
I understand that sort of criticism, but to be fair its not like they can pull a better lineup of games out of their ass... games take months if not years to make, so the seeds had to have been sown a long time ago before they could be reaped now. Sure, Nintendo should have made better preparations in the past... I'm just saying they can't change course in a moment's notice. Its like with the Titanic... even thoguh they seen the iceberg before they hit, that huge ass ship takes a long time to turn or stop so the collision with the iceberg was still unavoidable. Now, if the crew of the Titanic had a much earlier warning of the iceberg and more time in which to turn then yeah they could have avoided it.
But that analogy doesn't fully apply because there is never not a time when Nintendo shouldn't be releasing games, and if the studios they do have aren't enough to keep up with the task then they need more studios, plain and simple. This is something they need to have been doing years ago... its too late to do anything about the droughts of today, but they need more studios so this doesn't happen ever again.
Nintendo seem to be very wary in creating new studios. I think they got burned more than we thought by the Retro walk out in 2008. They seem to prefer teaming up with Western developers instead of buying them. Nintendo are a very traditional company, they don't like building up talent and then losing it. Company loyalty is very important for them. As Iwata has said before if you buy out a third party the talent may not necessarily stay. Then all you are left with is a shell of a company.
Nintendo are staffing up though. I believe they hired an extra 300 people for one of their Japanese studios not long ago and they created a new Monolith team. This E3 has shown that Nintendo has not learned from the 64/Gamecube/Wii. Obviously they were expecting to have a bigger third party display and their handful of Nintendo titles for the faithful. Nintendo obviously thought that the third party they gathered was enough for launch. It is enough third party games for launch, if WiiU was not up against 2 other competitors with similar hardware power. There are 4 third party exclusives for the WiiU (Rayman Legends, ZombiU, Tank! Tank! Tank!, and Ninja Gaiden: slightly better edition) I'm actually surprised that were able to get more than 1 (Granted Tank! is a 5 year old arcade port and calling Ninja Gaiden 3 Razor an exclusive is dubious, not counting Batman because Ninja Gaiden actually looks like the definite version)
Nintendo should have realised that they had two choices this gen, go for broke with strong hardware or do a half step. They of course chose the latter. However they should have expected that third parties were going to be waiting in the wings before porting all their crap. What third party would really start pushing all their games onto a system with 0 install base? Smart ones it seems. Ubisoft had massive success at the Wii launch, Redsteel sold 1 million for gods sake. Since Nintendo decided against all out power they had to show first and second party games, they needed to support their own system.
They announced 5/6(Depends if you count Ninja Gaiden a Nintendo game since it's published by them. Same with P-100) games for the WiiU. Not bad I guess for launch, depends how long their 'launch window' lasts, Reggie said something about it being an extra long launch window or some crap. Nintendo's main problem among most fans and press is that they showed nothing of their games that will appear past launch. People expect E3 to be the Mecca of games, a plethora of game announcements, Nintendo seems to have decided to hype their launch, not the console itself. There are rumours that support this theory, someone on gaf reckons that Retro had a demo that could have been shown (Take this with a grain of salt). Common sense dictates that other Nintendo studios would have been able to show off something, a teaser trailer/ CGI trailer/ concept art to get people excited. Nintendo must have games in development ready for mid-late 2013.
3DS is a different case. Seems to indicate that Nintendo are finished with announcing titles that are more than 6 months away. Look at the handling of Animal Crossing/Fire Emblem. Both are coming to the West with both released/nearly released in Japan. Yet they were no shows at E3. If this is what Nintendo's policy is now it's foolhardy. They are basically stopping people getting hyped about future software thus disillusioning fans. Though I suppose it could be a positive in some cases. Last Guardian was announced 6? years ago. Sony has been burned by that. And no one will ever forgot DNF. . . . .
Overall I think the Nintendo doom and gloom has been overblown(I myself was very upset after the conference, the hype is growing again though). E3 is not the conference it once was, Hell Nintendo Direct is more interesting. (That Nintendo Direct before the conference was better than the actual conference itself imo) The WiiU launch is shaping up as being more interesting than the Wii Launch (I hated TP so that's probably why). Most people would be fine if Nintendo did what they did in 2006 and showed games like Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 that didn't release for another year. Nintendo for some reason decided against it.
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Maybe Blizzard will release the long awaited sequel to StarCraft 64.
