Leland

nah, the graphic is nice to have in the post.

No you cannot chat across games with friends, there's no "party" system like on xbox or whatever the equivalent is on playstation. The only way you can communicate with your friends is to go onto miiverse and send them a private message or use the video chat (which is in a separate app so you cannot do anything else while using it).

I could understand Nintendo not putting voice chat in MK8 during races, I don't want to chat to people when I'm racing. Then they decided not to bother with voice chat in Smash, which i was really disappointed with. One of the biggest parts of smash is smack talking to your friends while you are kicking their ass, we all do it. And now, in a team based shooter i cannot talk to my teammates or even my friends.

I understand there are people who aren't bothered about voice chat, but to defend this decision and say Nintendo are right to take away options from their customers just makes you come across as a fanboy who thinks they can do no wrong. Nintendo need to stop with this nanny state bs, the majority of their fans are not children anymore, and even with children there are some very simple features which can be added for parents to stop their children using voice chat (like an "off" switch!).

Maybe youll find you deserve better than people defecating all over your face and laughing at you behind your back for being what their marketing department calls 'a whale that will keep buying our product no matter what as long as we tell them its good'

Here's your problem, mate:

There's a lot of truth in this. Iwata knowing gaming is a big advantage for them, however I'd also say it's a weakness. I feel like Iwata needs to take a step back and seriously reevaluate how he's running his company from a business standpoint. However that doesn't mean gutting the company, nor does it mean paying for good press. Gamers with half a brain already know to take the 'media' with a grain of salt, or two, or twelve. Also when your employees know that you care about them and are looking for their best interest then they will work harder and create better results. From a moral stand point there isn't any problem with what Iwata is doing. However there are other things he needs to seriously reconsider.

The first being that I think he lets his own devs have a bit too much input in to their console design whereas third parties have too little. It seems to me that Iwata looks at hardware as something that would be made that THEIR devs would like instead of building a platform that for the gaming community as a whole. Take for example the one slide pad on the 3DS. Now I personally don't think there is much use for a second one, however there are third parties who would think differently. I can almost guarantee you that Miyamoto said no to a second analogue stick because he wouldn't need it for one of his games and that was that.

Same with the Wii U. Someone like Miyamoto probably said it would be cool to have a giant screen in a controller and they went with it without considering specs that third parties would want. A console is simply the means to play software and the less amount of good software a console has, the less incentive there is to buy it. I say they should work towards building a good all around console that third parties want to work on and then they can innovate through software like they used to. 

Secondly Iwata needs to realize that Nintendo isn't in a bubble, they are in a business and therefore they have competition. What that competition does is important and they would go far by learning from it but doing it better. You can't have a non-competitive attitude in business if you want to survive. Trying to do things your own way is all well and good but if you're falling behind then it's not working. This goes hand in hand with Nintendo's slow adoption of HD. They had an entire generation to learn about what it would take to produce HD games in terms of time, budget, and manpower. There's really no excuse on their part, they should have been ready. 

All in all I think Iwata can turn things around but he really REALLY needs to actually LEARN from his mistakes. He always talks about how he's learned from mistakes, but he needs to show it and not say it.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Past success is past success, all eyes in Nintendo's board room is on the present and the immediate future.

Please, show me your magic crystal ball that proves this fact.