Topic: Satoru Iwata Named CEO of Nintendo of America

[Bman87301]

My gut tells me nothing will change.
My head tells me this is a stupid move and Iwata is taking off far more than he can chew.
My heart dreams that this will mean we'll get more localized releases, more VC games, and more happiness.
My gut's likely on the money, my head is probably not far off, and my heart is full of ****.

I think you're overestimating the duties of this position. What this most likely REALLY is, is nothing more than removing a redundant middleman between Reggie and Iwata. In other words, it's an efficiency move that's little more than a change ON PAPER, and will actually simplify things for Iwata. Any REAL duties that were previously done by Kimishima, will now just be done directly by Reggie... At least that's how I'm interpreting it.

[Ceric]

My gut tells me nothing will change.
My head tells me this is a stupid move and Iwata is taking off far more than he can chew.
My heart dreams that this will mean we'll get more localized releases, more VC games, and more happiness.
My gut's likely on the money, my head is probably not far off, and my heart is full of ****.

I think you're overestimating the duties of this position. What this most likely REALLY is, is nothing more than removing a redundant middleman between Reggie and Iwata. In other words, it's an efficiency move that's little more than a change ON PAPER, and will actually simplify things for Iwata. Any REAL duties that were previously done by Kimishima, will now just be done directly by Reggie... At least that's how I'm interpreting it.

I will disagree on part of that.  While yes it probably does remove the middleman there is a lot to be said about direct communication and taking away the Telephone Game.

[AnGer]

I'll be frank: I consider this to be a rather unpleasant move by Nintendo/Iwata. Nintendo is already known for being very centralized and everything revolving around the Japanese teams at NCL in Kyoto. From where I stand, Nintendo needs to restructure the company to a way where Europe and America have a bit more freedom and are maybe allowed to open up their own development studios.

[NWR_Lindy]

This really looks to me like they thought that NCL was really out of touch with NOA. Reggie now reports directly to Iwata, which makes sense as it was pretty clear that NOA Marketing was being thrown under the bus by Japan (in other words, there was a gap there that was causing problems). Now that excuse is gone, because Japan runs NOA Marketing/NOA directly (not that they didn't before, but there was no middleman).


As for Kimishima, I wonder if they thought that his experience with the American market might actually help NCL.  Note that his title includes analysis, which has been a problem for Nintendo lately.

[Shaymin]

I guess Iwata's talk about stepping down if the Wii U doesn't get its act together was all talk.  I can't see him even remotely thinking of doing such a thing after taking on more responsibility.

That was at the end of *next* fiscal year, not this one.