Nintendo Posts Half-Year Loss of $927 Million

It's funny (Gamefaqs pointed this out) that Toyota posted a bigger loss than this, also blamed on the strong Yen and no one barking that Toyota needs to make parts for GM or Volkswagon.

It's not the end of Nintendo, but it looks like trouble for Iwata. He seems to be nice and you'd think that if a guy loses 1.5 billion after making over 100 billion then he'd be allowed to make a couple mistakes, but there's a little more to it than that. Still, I hope the shareholders don't throw him out over it.

The Wii is sort of an artificial success. Sure, Nintendo sold a lot of Wii Sports, but in the process learned that software doesn't sell to casuals. The reason almost the entire industry tries to appeal to the hardcore crowd is because they are LOYAL. Yeah, they tend to be asshats and act like they're entitled, but part of the reason they do that is because they care, because they plan to buy software for their entire lives. Casual gamers are just that and thus too fleeting of an audience to be a reliable source of income. Nintendo's realization of this is probably why they shot themselves in the foot by rushing the 3DS and Wii-U.

There's always been something astoundingly backwards about Nintendo's strategies and in a way they're still plagued by the problems they had when the original Playstation took over the scene. Little by little though, they seem to be catching on. Hopefully they can finish this generation with the Wii having been seen as sort of a stall tactic that got them rich enough to make the console they were supposed to make a long time ago. The Wii is also sort of a happy accident in that it's helped developers discover the right amount of motion control to include in a game. In contrast, Microsoft's Kinect takes the concept of motion control way too far.