Nintendo’s been under a lot of fire from the media lately. The Wii U has been under-performing forcing Iwata and Miyamoto to take pay cuts, developers have stopped supporting it and at least one anonymous EA employee claims Nintendo is “dead” to them. One retailer has even gone as far as calling Mario Kart 8 Nintendo’s last chance.
Despite this, things aren’t all doom and gloom for Nintendo. The company is remaining calm and has announced a new business strategy to turn things around. Several developers continue to support the Wii U, and at least one EA employee has very publicly announced how he thinks Nintendo is a great partner.
Most recently, Amazon commercial finance manager Ketu Patel went on record to share his thoughts on Nintendo :
Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year. They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.
I think Nintendo have this imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception. Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done. If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.
So at least someone seems to have some faith in Nintendo. Do you agree with Patel? Do you think the media is being too hard on Nintendo lately?
[via Edge]
