Tendo City

Yes, after about fifteen years with Nintendo, Reggie Fils-Aime is retiring.  He's not all that old (57 or so I believe) so it's a bit of a surprise, but sure, good for him if he wants to.  I know I've always been somewhat indifferent towards Reggie, as I didn't exactly love that whole "my name is Reggie" introduction thing back in '04 and he's rarely had enough power to get the kinds of things done Nintendo of America's leaders did back in the '90s, but he will be missed.  That latter part isn't his fault, anyway; it was Iwata who chose to centralize power in Japan and not Reggie, after all, he just worked in that system.  I'm sure the next person, whose last name is, amusingly enough, Bowser, will similarly be mostly just a marketing person and not an actual division head like NoA used to have in the Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa days.  I think in many ways those were better days for NoA in terms of Western developer relations, but modern NoA has done a very good job of attracting indie developer support at least, and that's something.

I mean, the Switch has an insanely large game library!  It's over 1800 games already, which is kind of crazy.  And almost all of those are indies, and mostly Western ones.  Plenty of those games are no good, much like the bad-game-filled Wii U eshop, and finding the good ones can be difficult, but still that shows a lot of developer interest in Nintendo and I imagine Reggie has had a hand in that.  Even the Wii U had pretty solid indie support on its eshop, despite the systems' poor sales.  The Switch has a lot more bigger name titles because of its success, of course, but both have been successful, as was the Wii shop channel before it.

And yeah, I may not have cared for his memes, but Reggie was good at that stuff right from the beginning and that did benefit Nintendo for sure.  Not for me really (or, to a much greater extent, DJ, looking back at old threads here...), but for plenty of people.

Looking back I still don't know what unsettles me so much about him. In any event, his replacement comes from marketing. That right there is a little worrying, but hey, I'm old at this point. I still remember how great Howard Lincoln was at promoting Nintendo back in the day. Much of the good will towards Nintendo can be traced directly to his rather extreme promotional concept. Reggie never matched that sort of fervor. Bowser might, or might not, but his background in marketing is concerning.

Well, marketing is most of the job now, since after Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa retired in the early '00s, Nintendo of Japan took much more direct control over NoA... so it makes sense that another marketing guy would become the new head of NoA, unfortunately. I liked the days of a more powerful and independent NoA a lot, and wish we'd get back to more of that, but Iwata's centralized-control concept continues.

On the plus side though, maybe this has led to fewer Japan-only games? I mean, I'm not sure because there were a good number of Wii and DS games that stayed in Japan only, but more recently almost everything has gotten a worldwide release, which is a big change from Nintendo before. I doubt Reggie had anything to do with that though, he just sold the thing NCL told him to sell. (Sure, the Howard Lincoln way led to things like us not getting any Fire Emblem games in the '90s, but it also led ot things like the partnership with Rare...)