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Yamauchi Retiring from Nintendo's Board

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the calling-it-quits dept.

terrisus writes "While he had stepped down as President a few years back, Hiroshi Yamauchi had remained on Nintendo's Board of Directors. In June, however, Yamauchi will now be retiring from the Board of Directors as well. He will be foregoing his multi-million dollar retirement package, instead desiring the money be put to work in other places. He will still be a 10% stockholder in the company. It's sad to see him go."

28 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. My Yamauchi retired a while ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apparently, I didn't feed it enough. I'm surprise Nintendo kept theirs alive this long.

    1. Re:My Yamauchi retired a while ago by AndroidCat · · Score: 2, Funny

      Huh? But mine was a Yamauchi!

      --
      One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
    2. Re:My Yamauchi retired a while ago by aichpvee · · Score: 2

      You must be new here.

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
  2. It is sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But despite being sad probably not a bad thing. Yamauchi is pretty much personally responsible for the fact that Nintendo in the mid-90s were frankly a bunch of unrepentant assholes, and thus indirectly responsible for the fleeing of Square and pretty much all of the rest of Nintendo's developer base as well. His departure from the spot at the helm of Nintendo meanwhile is the chief reason for Nintendo's relative degree of recovery lately. Many companies however, such as Namco, have still indicated they retain hard feelings over the treatment they received from yamauchi.

    That said, exactly what is the functional difference between being on the board and owning 10% of the company anyway?

    1. Re:It is sad by TEMM · · Score: 3, Informative

      The board makes decisions that affect the company directly, while shareholders are only responsible for electing the board of governors.

    2. Re:It is sad by SetupWeasel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Now that Namco is making games like Star Fox Assult, Donkey Konga, and the arcade Mario Kart, I think much of the wounds have healed. Nintendo has been going out of their way to mend relations with 3rd parties in the last couple years.

  3. Non-greedy executive? by Fyre2012 · · Score: 5, Insightful


    "He will be foregoing his multi-million dollar retirement package, instead desiring the money be put to work in other places"

    Wow... i'm impressed... when was the last time any other executive ever gave up a multi-million dollar severance package with the advice "it's best spent on something other than me"

    what would happen if exec's around the world took this example to heart?

    --
    This is not the greatest .sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
    1. Re:Non-greedy executive? by Tirinal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Things like this are actually par the course in Japan, where the yearly salary ratio of the top 10% of wage earners to the bottom 10% is only 4:1. In America it's 15:1, for reference.

      In short: yay for work ethic.

      --
      ~Tirinal
    2. Re:Non-greedy executive? by Nept · · Score: 4, Informative

      Chief executives at U.S. companies that shipped jobs overseas won a 46 percent pay hike last year, more than five times the average CEO raise. If the U.S. minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay has since 1990, it would be $15.76 an hour instead of the current $5.15. CEO pay overall was 301 times higher than the $26,899 earned by the average production worker. The pay for CEOs who outsource was about 3,300 times the pay of an Indian call center employee or 1,300 times that of an average Indian computer programer.

      Ref:
      Title: U.S. CEOs Who Outsource Get Bigger Pay Hike-Survey
      Source: Reuters
      Author: Andrea Hopkins

      --
      "Teachers leave us kids alone ..." - Roger Waters, Pink Floyd
  4. Eat the cherries by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    Perhaps his health is in decline? It's hard to imagine that anything else could push him to retire.

    A few powerups and he'll be back.

  5. Well there it is then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mr. Yamauchi is going and so ends an era. No doubt, for a time Nintendo got too big for their boots although I have little pity when Nintendo originallly screwed Sony way back and made fools out of them.

    However times changed, audienced moved on. Sony moved forward, Nintendo stood still. A stream of half baked products didn't help them and the once mighty Nintendo who simply ruled the home console market for so long became part of the past. Of course M$ didn't help much either. Difficult to know what to feel, I always got the impression Yamauchi was a bit an ol' stick in the mud and not a particularly nice person.

    1. Re:Well there it is then by CSMastermind · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You know I never liked Yamauchi but I respect the man for what he was able to do. Your observations about the game industry are slighly off base. You're right times did change. Still Nintendo wasn't standing still. More 64's were sold than super nintendos believe it or not. It's simply that Sony opened up NEW markets. They found people who had never owned a gaming console and they sold to them. At first they fudged the numbers to try and make their console look better. They orginally marketed the PS2 as a cheap DVD player. In fact, the fact that they included a DVD player and the Dreamcast didn't have one was proablly a big reason that Sony went down so hard in those console wars. Nintendo's marketshare may be a shadow of it's former self but I wouldn't go counting them down and out. On a side note, god bless microsoft (bet I just offened 80% of slashdot with that). But I mean it. I'm thankfull for the X-Box. It's a good concept and god forbid it's by an American company. I hope they crush Sony in the next round of consoles and I'm pretty sure that if they do they'll do it with better games (they already have better hardware) so everyone will win.

    2. Re:Well there it is then by happymedium · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nintendo originallly screwed Sony way back and made fools out of them

      Yes, Nintendo did quit the Playstation-as-SNES-addon deal, but that probably ended up being the best thing that ever happened to Sony. You can hardly say the Big N "made fools out of them."

      I agree with your assessment of Yamauchi, though. He seemed very pompous, feeling personally betrayed by Squaresoft's decision to start producing for the PS, when in fact the CD format was the only way they could have done justice to FFVII's story and scope. Nintendo is still playing catch-up to recover from the decisions he made and the crucial bridges he burned.

    3. Re:Well there it is then by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the console manufacturers are going to have a hard time this go-round basing their consoles on horsepower and pixel-pushing. Sure there will be that contingent of people who always have to have "the best', but if Nintendo's any indication (particularly in the handheld market) it's that gameplay is the key, not hardware.

      The thing that killed the Dreamcast was the Microsoft tactic of "wait! Our console will slice bread, give you sex anytime you want, and make a lifelong companion!" Sony hyped the SNOT out of the PS2, and people waited. That waiting crushed Sega's strapped financials enough that it couldn't launch a counterattack when the PS2 did come out (with shitty launch titles and less than advertised power.) I don't know if Sony can do that twice in its lifetime. We'll have to see. If they can, the XBox will suffer in sales while people "wait" for the next big thing from Sony.

      But back to my original point. You can have the best console numbers in terms of raw horsepower in the world, but if you don't have a library of games people want to play, you're not going to go very far. Microsoft's console may be more powerful, but with the exception of a few titles, Sony's got the big games and developers wrapped up. Microsoft's getting a Square game (rumors, I think. Has it been confirmed?) And if that's the case, it might be the coup of the century.

      Maybe I'm way off base, but I think we're going to see the graphical "leaps and bounds" start to slow down this next generation of consoles, just like CPU speed's no longer becoming a huge update every 18 months. It's not necessarily engineering limitations, but there's only so real you can make something before people aren't 'wowed' by your creations anymore. The hook of "more lifelike" whatever might not hook that many who are satisfied with the tons of games and tons of things for the current consoles. I mean, who has time to play all the library of games for these machines?

      PSX -> PS2 (big leap)... PS2 -> XBox a lesser leap (but one nonetheless, with XBox's powerful hardware compared to the PS2) PS2 -> PS3 Not such a huge leap.

      XBox -> XBox Next? I'm betting it will be less than a huge leap too.

      Eh, I'm just rambling. It might be that the new consoles are the shiznit. I just don't have a feeling they will be.

      --
      It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
  6. Well, at least he's honorable. by PornMaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm impressed by not taking money for leaving, unlike a certain Fiorina we all know.

    --
    500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
  7. Domo Arigato ,Mr. YamuchiO! by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Informative

    The man who took nintendo from a local playing card company , to a corperate Behemoth of the Gaming world.
    If it wern't for his foresight , it is likely today the only time you would hear the name nintendo , is if for some reason someone read the manufacturing info on a deck of cards during a game of poker.
    http://www.nintendoland.com.nyud.net:8090/home2.ht m?history/hist1.htm
    Thats a nice quick rundown of the history of the company .

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    1. Re:Domo Arigato ,Mr. YamuchiO! by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Intresting side note to that , the origions of the word/name Nintendo.
      What does the word Nintendo really mean?
      The word Nintendo is composed of 3 Japanese Kanji characters, Nin-ten-do. These characters can be translated into a sentence like: "Heaven blesses hard work" but it can also be taken the mean of something like: "Leave luck to heaven", "we do all that we can, as best we can, and await the results" or "Work hard but in the end it´s in the hands of the heaven". Other suggestions are: "Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do" and some people believe that it stands for: "The house where you leave everything to the heaven/fortune" (A Casino).
      (Thanks again to nintendoland.com)
      --
      The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    2. Re:Domo Arigato ,Mr. YamuchiO! by snorklewacker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Even though most asian languages just happen to have a one-syllable word for every syllable in the language, that doesn't mean the reverse is true, that every syllable in a word is related to the single-syllable word. The syllables don't mean anything by themselves. It's like that old saw of "assume" being made up of "ass", "you" (hey it's the syllable, right?), and "me". That bit about the chinese word for "crisis" being formed from "danger" and "opportunity" is basically the same way.

      Of course, the chinese *do* enjoy wordplay, much like that "assume" bit (my favorite silly phrasing is "assuming makes an ass of u and ming"), so you'll sometimes see these patterns "discovered" anyway. One great example is a chinese story that makes perfect sense written down, but read aloud, every word is "Shiu" (with different tonalities). It doesn't make any sense even to Chinese, it's like that "had had had had had had had had" brainteaser ... it's meant to be a sort of tongue twister.

      It doesn't point to some exotic holistic school of thought, just a linguistic principle of economy in assigning common words to single syllables, and even overloading them based on contextual rules that would make Larry Wall blush (and he's got a degree in linguistics).

      Of course, Nintendo is a deliberately coined name, and sort of like "Agilent" (it's "agile" and "talent", right?) so it's certainly meant to convey the gist of some meaning. Given the fact that they made playing cards for like a hundred years before getting into electronics, my guess is on the latter (casino) interpretation.

      But languages aren't (yet) composed entirely of brand names, so try not to read too much meaning into the pieces of words. It's like postmodernism, if you cut everything up into too-small pieces, you have mush, not components.

      --
      I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
  8. Re:Bye Yamauchi by FidelCatsro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Perhaps he should have retierd sooner , but without him , chances are Nintendo would today still be selling paper-backed playing cards

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  9. Re:Bye Yamauchi by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Funny

    But .. they are still selling playing cards, like the Pokémon Trading Card game. :)

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  10. Re:Bye Yamauchi by Maul · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your statement would be insightful except for the fact that Nintendo is a profitable company.

    --

    "You spoony bard!" -Tellah

  11. A Genius by warmgun · · Score: 5, Informative
    Maybe he was responsible for some of Nintendo's Microsoft-esque strong arm tactics with distributors and publishers, but Nintendo is still a very profitable company, despite being #2 or #3 in the console race, much due to his leadership. Can Microsoft say that about their videogames division? Nintendo is going to be here for a long time to come and it's all due to Yamauchi-san. He will be missed.

    Just FYI, did you know he's the largest shareholder of the Seattle Mariners?

  12. Not worried... by ChrisHanel · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sure this is just a move to free up his schedule for more Donkey Konga.

    --

    -=-This sig brought to you by The Cheat; and by Viewers Like You.-=-

  13. Re:Bye Yamauchi by BinaryOpty · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, Nintendo took back the card making rights from WotC about a couple of years ago right after the invent of Pokemon-e. (here's a link to a news story)

  14. Yamauchi wants Nintendos to make movies. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yamauchi's last major decision at Nintendo was to get the company into animated films. http://www.joystiq.com/entry/2511842316440486/ This may be a good idea. PlayStation marginalized Nintendo's consoles, and PSP will probably marginalize Nintendo's handhelds. But if Nintendo makes CG movies in house, they could do Pixar quality animation with Ghibli-quality stories at under half of Pixar's production budget.

    Admittedly, Yamauchi wants Nintendo's first movie(s) to be about some ancient Japanese poems, but that may just be some personal favor he's asking the company to do for him, since his hobby is Go and other old Japanese stuff. After that, Nintendo will probably start adapting their games into movies, as well as making original movie franchises.

    Nintendo is a relatively small company that can't hold onto an established market once cash-rich conglomerates like Sony and Microsoft set their sights on it. Nintendo is best at creating and exploding new markets that nobody else believes in. They did it with the NES. They did it with Game Boy. They did it by bringing Pokemon to USA (in 1996, Nintendo Power itself predicted that Pokemon was too foreign to become popular in USA). Soon, Nintendo might do it again. This time with movies.

    1. Re:Yamauchi wants Nintendos to make movies. by Bongo+Bill · · Score: 2, Informative

      I'm not sure where you're coming from to imply that Nintendo's sales are "marginalized" (last I checked, five million DS units sold is not indicative of marginalization, nor is a 37% overall market share), and you must of course realize that although it is a "relatively small company" when compared to Sony and Microsoft, it is certainly not small on any objective scale.

      --
      ...but is it art?
  15. Re:Game Face by Staats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He's 77 years old and filthy rich. What the hell does he want 10 million dollars for? He's a competitor, always has, always will be, and now he wants his side to win.

  16. Re:retires with seven billion or so, eh by e1618978 · · Score: 2, Funny

    And if it wasn't for people like him, we would all be starving. People who get rich by making the world a better place, and by creating jobs, deserve the money that they get.