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Nintendo Names Tatsumi Kimishima As New President
RogueyWon writes: Following the death of Satoru Iwata in July, Nintendo has announced the appointment of Tatsumi Kimishima as its new president. The 65-year-old Mr. Kimishima has been serving as Nintendo's human resources director (PDF), following a previous stint as the CEO of Nintendo of America and earlier work on the management of the Pokémon franchise. Kimishima takes up post at a time of considerable change for Nintendo, with the company beginning a tentative step into the mobile games market and preparing for the launch of a new console, codenamed "NX", in 2016.
Yet you are going to vote for Hillary...
I'm 43 and I wouldn't even want the job. Yes I've been a gamer since the early days (Intellivision) but seeing the crap being sold as games these days, plus the social media shit on top of it all - I can't understand the appeal of it all. I mean, you want to Tweet your fucking achievements? In my days, the only achievement you had was being able to finish a game, which was pretty hard for most games. These days you have infinite lives, infinite retries, time rewinding, etc. You shouldn't even be proud to finish the damn game at all.
The only way I'd accept the job would be if it were for a sub-division within the company which only targets older gamers who want "classic/retro" games.
Now get off my virtual lawn!
It's fairly rare for an HR director to step up to CEO level. In a lot of companies, the HR director isn't even on the board.
I'm only guessing here, really, but it looks as though he was more or less just filling time as HR director, possibly while being groomed as a potential successor. Even though nobody saw Iwata's death coming, there was speculation that another year of poor results could have led to calls for him to stand down, so I'm sure there was succession planning going on.
His time as the head of Nintendo of America (predecessor to Reggie Fils-Aime) is probably more notable. That's a fairly meaty job. It's also one he didn't do particularly well in some respects; Nintendo's US market-share generally declined during his tenure.
He doesn't seem to have a particularly high public profile. From what little I've been able to gleam, he's very conservative in his approach. Don't expect Nintendo to go embracing any radical ideas, or even many sensible modernisations, under his tenure. This is a conservative appointment by a conservative company based in the most conservative city of a country whose business practices tend to default to conservative. The message that this appointment sends is about a commitment to business as usual.
The lack of a real public profile makes it hard to tell, but he doesn't seem to be particularly passionate about games. The closest he's been to the coal-face seems to be during his time at The Pokémon Company, but even there he was very much on the business and marketing side rather than the development side. There's no rule that gaming company CEOs need to be passionate about games. But there are risks from going the other direction; would MS have fallen into so many obvious pitfalls during the development of the Xbox One if they'd had somebody who actually understood gaming and gamers in charge?
There's a chance that Kimishima's tenure might be quite a short one. If the NX doesn't take off (and the odds are against it - mid-cycle console launches have a poor history) and Nintendo doesn't protect or grow other areas of its business (handheld and mobile respectively), then shareholders are likely to look to see him replaced with somebody a bit more radical.
Ironically, the most recent Zelda game (Link Between Worlds) is essentially a 2D game (isometric projection).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I wasn't implying that the PS3 was a failure. But it wasn't as big a success as it could have been. As console wars go, the seventh generation was a damned close run thing (as demonstrated by your link), and it was much more complicated than the numbers imply.
The Wii "won" the start of the cycle, with a massive sales lead at the 2-year point. But it ran out of steam in the late cycle and Nintendo fell to its first annual losses in the company's history during the closing years of the cycle. Its later years were characterized by a fairly miserable attach rate for games as well - a lot of those consoles sold early on just sat in cupboards neglected after a year or two.
The 360 more or less "won" the middle years, when it closed a lot of ground on the Wii and was comfortably ahead of the PS3 at the mid-point of the cycle. MS were investing a lot of money in exclusive titles at that point and the 360 had a (generally deserved) reputation as the best system for cross-platform gaming.
And the PS3 basically "won" the end-game, when its sales pulled ahead of the 360's, buoyed by a much stronger late line-up of exclusives (MS seemed to lose interest in supporting the 360 once the Kinect wave subsided).
But Sony's performance must have been a disappointment for the company. They had been the "must own" console of the previous cycle (a large portion of Xbox and Gamecube owners also owned a PS2) and they never quite re-took that position. There were certainly signs and statements from Sony during the first half of the PS3's life that indicated it was performing below expectations.
Following up a mega-successful console has historically proved difficult. The SNES dominated its generation, but Nintendo fumbled the successor. The Nintendo DS sold by the bucketloads and yet, despite a massive sales push (and the company moving to the hardware-at-a-loss model for the first time ever), the 3DS has never really broken beyond the kind of sales that the (successful, but to a lesser degree) PSP seemed to manage.
My original post a few layers back was basically about the inability of all three of the major console manufacturers to turn a commanding position in one console cycle into an equally commanding one in the next. There are strong signs that in this particular market, success breeds arrogance and complacency. I don't think any of the responses have refuted that.
Mr. Kimishima is a great choice Nintendo. He is a banker and CFO at heart, but I found him much more personable and approachable than Iwata-san. He goes way back in the Nintendo family including CFO at Pokemon and functionally the chairman of Nintendo of America (NOA). NOA tends to have alternating layers of Japanese and American levels of senior. Mr. Kimishima was definitely Japan's top representative to NOA in the US. As a banker and CFO type he is well placed to help Nintendo evolve into its next incarnation to meet the changing landscape of disappearing handheld business. His old Keiretsu bank employer is a nexus for business and money in Osaka. He knows how to build relationships outside partners and invent to put big N on a sound footing.