Games News Story

With the recent passing of Saturo Iwata I thought maybe we should look back at his accomplishments and get a view on Saturo’s perspective of how Nintendo makes its games. So in honor of the president of Nintendo here is an article of a few things from Iwata’s career.

Summary

The article summarizes about how President Satoru Iwata of Nintendo was once a game programmer in HAL Laboratory Inc. and talks about how he/ his team at Nintendo think/ visualize how a video game should be made in the industry. Satoru has given various speeches as to how Nintendo goes about making certain decisions on their product compared to other gaming companies. Although its nerve wrecking to try something new without knowing whether it might succeed or fail, being different is what makes Satoru Iwata a great leader to be very innovative with his products. Playing it safe is what Satoru refers to other companies that don’t take risk, such as Sony Entertainment with their Playstation 2 that know it is the obvious easy choice to go for. Iwata once being a programmer himself can see as to why anyone would choose the easy route, for the fear of failure. Example being the Gamecube console which was Nintendo’s flop, but instead of seeing it as a failure Satoru saw it as a learning experience. Over the years of Satoru working alongside Shigeru Miyamoto has been a pleasure and another great learning experience for him being able to have an insight on Shigeru’s mind. So in simpler terms Satoru likes to reach out to a wide audience even if it means being a risk taker or failure, but in the end what matters to him is not the cost or engineering that a developer should worry about but the ingenuity and imagination one puts in a video game….their heart aww.

Stakeholders:

Nintendo (Publisher): Having to come up with new ideas and constantly changing the way a console works/ looks can put a lot on cost to develop a new console. It is also a risk that the entire company is putting on a system that might do terrible in sales. The company itself has a lot more to lose for a game/console that might or might not succeed at all.

Other Game Companies: If other gaming companies such as Sony Entertainment were to take risks such as Nintendo then their reputation can be at stake, their budget, and perhaps even their game company. If game companies were to publish just about any kind of game with a random person and a random idea then companies would be losing lots of money in the process.

Satoru Iwata: Coming up with new ideas can cost a lot of money that can also cost him his job if his company goes down under. Satoru has a lot to lose for he is the president of Nintendo and can cost all of his employees to lose their job and lose his company; in general there would be no Nintendo which was a part of our history (with the crash of ’83). His whole livelihood is what’s at stake.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChristianNutt/20150715/248658/Reflecting_on_Iwata_as_a_game_dev_and_Nintendos_boss.php