21st February 2019, 10:46 PM
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.
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.