Former Nintendo Executive Discusses Nintendo’s Culture

http://www.dromble.com/2015/01/21/former-nintendo-executive-dan-adelman-discusses-nintendos-culture-third-party-support-and-much-more/

by aaronbrethorst • 12 years ago

88 17 12 years ago

dromble.com

pikachu_is_cool• 12 years ago

The lack of comments surprises me

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

It's usually proportional to the lack of contents, or the lack of controversy.

kderbe• 12 years ago

A fair amount of the interview is dedicated to Nintendo's eShop and how its pricing, release schedule, and promotions are determined by Nintendo's market research--as well as company culture. It also brings up a study I'd not heard of before, that says game demos significantly lower sales ( http://www.computerandvideogames.com/416824/ ).

I think it's an interesting read for anyone involved in digital marketplaces or who offers free trials of their product.

Retra• 12 years ago

I'm not surprised that demos lower sales, since in my personal experience, most games are just terrible and demos don't change that, they only remind me of that fact before I buy a game. (And I don't even buy games anymore because I've learned my lesson. Now I'll just make any game I want to play.)

eru• 12 years ago

(And I don't even buy games anymore because I've learned my lesson. Now I'll just make any game I want to play.)

That's an interesting attitude.

I rather play nethack, than write it.

skuhn2• 12 years ago

I also found the assertion about demos interesting, and it seemed somewhat unintuitive to me. I can think of two possible reasons for the correlation:

  1. Demos provide enough of the gameplay to satisfy your curiosity
  2. Demos let you discover that you won't like a game without buying it

However, I'm not convinced that the sales study actually includes enough data to establish correlation at all. Simply breaking down sales into groups (trailer/demo+trailer/demo/nothing) overlooks other differentiators that can have a major impact on sales.

The biggest one to my mind is simply the budget of a game. An indie game has no chance of selling equivalent units to a AAA game with a giant marketing budget. A demo may seem more prudent to an indie developer (or not), since it can be done on spec rather than requiring money to actually change hands. Yet, demo or not, it will never touch the sales level of a trailer-only AAA game. A more informative study would account for these factors.

hvidgaard• 12 years ago

For that data to be even remotely useful, they need to look at how long time do people spend playing the game, and customer satisfaction. I do not doubt that proper demos make people buy less games, but on the other hand you have less disgruntled customers because they didn't spend 60€ on a game that isn't very good.

I seriously cannot understand why any console maker doesn't go all out and focus on the customer. Tell publishers to either make a reasonable demo, or accept that people buy the game and can get a refund if they've played it less than an hour.

cturner• 12 years ago

Nintendo has a young audience. I think of being at the mall with the kids, letting them loose on the coin machines for ten minutes, but not putting any money in.

mrschwabe• 12 years ago

Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company. For people who aren’t familiar, Kyoto-based are to Japanese companies as Japanese companies are to US companies. They’re very traditional, and very focused on hierarchy and group decision making. Unfortunately, that creates a culture where everyone is an advisor and no one is a decision maker – but almost everyone has veto power.

If you read Patrick McKenzie's recent article on "Doing Business in Japan" you can get some better context of just how rigid these 'Kyoto-based' must be:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

hkmurakami• 12 years ago

I have trouble even listing large Kyoto based companies other than Kyocera and Nintendo. (Hatena is the only prominent web services company there, but it is much smaller).

The reputation I heard from inside japan when I lived and worked there wads that of "weirdness" rather than being necessarily more heirichical. I don't think it's a linear "even more Japanese compared to USA standards" thing going on. They're known for being more cultish and wacky in their own ways, like Kyocera employees' fanatical effort into their annual all company sports tournament.

I can see how this weirdness and cultishness might be seen as being "more hierarchical" from a non domestic person's eyes though.

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

You never heard of Aiful and Wacoal? Sagawa express, too.

patio11• 12 years ago

FWIW, I've heard the same thing, verbatim, about Nagoya companies. Just like every town in Japan thinks that it is the one that discovered that great water makes great soba and great sake, and that all other towns' soba and sake is deficient due to lack of the proper water for it, I think it may be possible that every town in Japan not-so-secretly believes that only their companies are still Japanese and that all other Japanese companies have succumbed to weird foreign influence.

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

I work with companies both in Kyoto and Tokyo and honestly there's not so MUCH of a difference between them. It depends much more of the company culture than the location in my experience. You can get over-conservative companies in Tokyo as well. As for the whole paragraph about Nintendo's company culture, it sounds very much like every other Japanese company out there (no individual leadership, everything through the group, veto from top managers) and nothing specific to video games businesses.

fidotron• 12 years ago

All this really is is "I don't work in head office" syndrome. Generally everyone outside head office is either aware of how opaque the goings on are or they have been deluded by the koolaid.

Western companies are just as bad in these respects as their Japanese counterparts.

jrs99• 12 years ago

would the creative people be a part of the rigid hierarchies?

Former Nintendo Executive Discusses Nintendo’s Culture

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