Nintendo's corporate culture part of the problem?

Nintendo's Decision Making Process Too Slow, Too Safe, Ex-Exec Says

In a new interview with Dromble, Nintendo's former indie boss Dan Adelman explained why he believes the company's "traditional" nature might be partly to blame for a corporate culture that he said can be "inefficient" and "time-consuming."

"Nintendo is not only a Japanese company, it is a Kyoto-based company," Adelman, who left Nintendo after nine years last summer, said. "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 adviser and no one is a decision maker--but almost everyone has veto power."

Adelman went on to say that even Nintendo's chief, Satoru Iwata, is "often loathe to make a decision that will alienate one of the executives in Japan." As a result, Adelman said getting anything done at Nintendo "requires laying a lot of groundwork," including speaking with all major stakeholders to confirm they are on-board with a proposal.

This issue is even more apparent at Nintendo's subsidiaries, Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, Adelman said. On top of that, ideas can be shot down if someone isn't thrilled, which can lead to the suppression of "bolder" proposals, Adelman explained.

"All of this is not necessarily a bad thing, though it can be very inefficient and time-consuming," he explained. "The biggest risk is that at any step in that process, if someone flat-out says no, the proposal is as good as dead. So in general, bolder ideas don’t get through the process unless they originate at the top."

Nintendo, as a games hardware designer, is renowned for its bold ideas, fro the Wii controller to the dual touch-screen DS.

Adelman outlined two further problems with Nintendo's business makeup, the first of which has to do with aging executives not fully grasping the current gaming landscape. This could be one of the reasons why Nintendo lags behind the likes of Microsoft and Sony as it relates to online gaming and features such asunified account systems, Adelman said.

"At the risk of sounding ageist, because of the hierarchical nature of Japanese companies, it winds up being that the most senior executives at the company cut their teeth during NES and Super NES days and do not really understand modern gaming, so adopting things like online gaming, account systems, friends lists, as well as understanding the rise of PC gaming has been very slow," he said. "Ideas often get shut down prematurely just because some people with the power to veto an idea simply don't understand it."

Finally, Adelman said Nintendo's corporate culture does not do much to reward those who come up with new ideas.

"There is very little reason to try and push these ideas. Risk taking is generally not really rewarded," he said. "Long-term loyalty is ultimately what gets rewarded, so the easiest path is simply to stay the course. I'd love to see Nintendo make a more concerted effort to encourage people at all levels of the company to feel empowered to push through ambitious proposals, and then get rewarded for doing so."

Prior to joining Nintendo in 2005, Adelman worked at Microsoft, where he helped launch Xbox Live Arcade. Adelman quit Nintendo in August 2014 and now works as a business consultant for independent developers.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-s-decision-making-process-too-slow-too-sa/1100-6424780/

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Makes sense to me. Corporate values and structure can certainly hinder the products. I feel Sony does the best job of embracing risk out of the companies. They are constantly coming up with new ideas for products (Morpheus), services (PS Now), and new games (The Order), as well as finding new ways to expand the business (indies). At Microsoft, there's seems to be this process of trying to link Xbox to their overall plans as a software giant. And that's what screwed up their plans for an always connected, entertainment hub, meant to conquer the living room. Meanwhile, Nintendo's age is starting to show. I like Nintendo franchises, but they no longer carry the weight of the company on its shoulders. As highly rated as they can be, it's only being bought by a select few.

What do you think, SW? Is it about time Nintendo shakes things up at corporate? At least MS is trying.

You make some weird threads.

Their sinking sales will probably right the ship when it comes to this nonsense.

There should be a daily thread cap

Of course it's part of the problem.

Nintendo is just too traditional for their own good. Iwata doesn't have the balls to put his foot down and tell those higher ups to shove it with their old traditional ways.

The Great Sean Malstrom has pointed that Nintendo rarely fires their employees (Other than the late Gumpei Yokoi which is a mystery as he wasn't really fired, but just was punished by sitting in his desk, do nothing, and think about his shame for making Virtual Boy [when it's actually Miyamoto's idea] until he decided to clear his desk).

Yeah, I have noticed that Nintendo of Japan calls all the shots instead of NoA or NoE. As for game development, it urks me how Saka-fullofshit-moto never acknowledge the Prime games into the Metroid Universe Timeline or even recognizes the accomplishment of a Western Studios making the best games of the franchise history. Same for Aonuma, as he makes Zelda games more appealing to his son more than the fans (other than hardcore fans, they eat it all up); then again, they have pressure to make Zelda games as good as OoT (which they had with MM).

I found this section of Nintendo's 2003 E3 rather interesting. Basically Iwata damage controlling the Gamecube's poor sales and overall how he views the gaming industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd3fqguykh8#t=567

Bet he wishes they had those *poor* sales now.

The sad fact is Nintendo is still making the same mistakes they made in 2002-2003.

In terms of what they were thinking for the future at that time sure, but the GBA and Gamecube were almost perfect systems besides the unfair kiddy label put on the gamecube by consumers. Look at all those amazing 3rd party games! Well except Twin snakes :p

I really hope next gen they can go back to these golden years, and also get multiplats next gen.

Well, duh.

You want the years of even more draconian policies?

Besides, "glory days" is something that will never return.

I just mean in terms of hardware and game philosophy. From the controller to the chipset, GC was nearly the perfect machine at the time. No silly gimmicks, focus on ergonomics, bleeding edge hardware (which although they can't match that now because of the sheer size of gpu's nowadays, they could get close if they wanted).

Their philosophy in regards to handhelds, power wise is still sound but then they started to add gimmicks and stopped caring about ergonomics there too. Their first mistake with Wii (a long term mistake) was bringing the gunpei yokoi specs philosophy to home consoles.

In these area's, they've fallen hard. And yeah, they're still doing dumb, backwards anti consumer stuff today that they need to fix as well.

I find Sony's and MS's culture more worthy of an investigation. Why did they go for closed PC platforms instead of consoles? Where are their killer games? Have they lost most of their gaming culture?

@MonsieurX: all you know how to do is bitch about threads.

Even with problems with its corporate culture, Nintendo in some ways still make great games.

Every home console is technically a computer. The Atari 2600 could have ran Basic if it was programmed to.

I think it affects their online to an an extent. They fear open chat will lead to what is present on other platforms.

I think TC is part of the problem

This is not an exclusively Nintendo problem.

Lots of Japanese companies have this similar hierarchy.

Funny, I get crucified for saying this to Charizard

Slobbing on the admin's e-knob SW?

Well he is king...

Already knew this..& if you have been reading/following Nintendo...quite a few fans have already pointed this out. Unless Iwata & co is removed OR Iwata & co makes the change, nothing will change. :P

@superbuuman: After reading this article, I am even less convinced that Iwata leaving would solve any problems Nintendo has. In fact, replacing him might be even more damaging to Nintendo than whatever damage Iwata has ever done.

Just because of Nintendo's corporate structure doesn't mean that things can't be done, it's a matter of requiring delicate skills to get everyone on board with a plan through whatever means necessary.

I buy it. They're really slow to do the most basic things, like publishing games that they own on their digital stores, which is essentially just emulation, it's not port development, so time and resource consumption is basically making digital guides and eShop/website pages for the titles with short descriptions, images of the game, sometimes a trailer, nothing huge. For third party games I imagine it's a little more work just to negotiate royalties for games on the eShop.

.......of which Iwata plays the crucial role. I've suspected this for a long time now. I'm sure Iwata is a nice guy, and that's probably 99% of the problem. He can't say "boo" to anyone and get shit done. He is the CEO, and he has the final say. If he can't effectively grow a pair of balls he has no place in being in the role of a leader.

In general, hierarchy is not a problem. Toyota became the biggest automotive company in the world, *because* of its strictly hierarchical approach. In the 1970s, Volvo tried to democratize its design and manufacturing processes. They radically cut down hierarchies and left many decisions to micro teams at the bottom of the hierarchy. While many employees certainly liked it, the impact on efficiency was catastrophic. At the same time, Toyota went for the opposite extreme: They radically centralized the decision making and optimized all the design and maufacturing processes in a top-down approach that closely followed the rules of Taylorism. As a matter of fact, Toyota won the competion and became a role model for other car makers.

However, the quoted statements in the original post are a bit self-contradictory. On the one hand, it is claimed that Nintendo is hierarchical, and in the next sentence it is critized that the decision making process is spread across too many people. That does not fit together, because in a strictly hierarchical organization, the decision making is centralized. According to what was quoted in the orginal post, I would not regard Nintendo as a hierarchical organization at all.

It sounds more like Nintendo has a committee style organizational structure like you sometimes find it in parliaments and other political institutions.

Dan Adelman seems to contradict himself in a few places. On the one hand, he says the organization is too hierarchical, yet on the other hand he says the power is shared. On the one hand, he says the company's structure makes it difficult to get ideas through, yet Nintendo's ideas are still more original than what Sony or Microsoft come up with.

I understand he doesn't like how Nintendo is controlled by older folks instead of younger folks, but if the power was to be handed over to younger folks, we could just end up with another company following popular trends and trying to be another Sony or Microsoft instead of doing its own thing.

And the worst kind to boot. But of course, some will see this as "modernizing".

Welcome to SW

I feel that they give too much time of their developers to finish their games, and don't enforce deadlines at all. Yes, it does take time to make games perfect, but when you have a console that is tanking due to the lack of games or can't even provide more digital titles, including VC support, while we wait for the next Zelda, that's going to be a problem with long-time fans.

I would like to see Nintendo push for deadlines more, they can still polish up their titles but at least realize that their fans can't wait for the end of the year all the time, just because they want to make sales on the holidays.

@FireEmblem_Man: Look at what happened at the end of 2014 if you want to see the results of a deadline based approach for gaming.(cough Assassin's Creed Unity cough)

Nintendo did make new games, yall didnt buy em

Most recent example Bayonetta 2

NEXT

What does the elimination or reduction of inefficient managerial bureaucracy have to do with following popular trends? What direction a business moves is a separate issue from the manner of the system that governs it. It's entirely possible to retain a company's uniqueness that still utilizes competent management, and vice versa.

You seem to be implying that for Nintendo to retain its uniqueness it needs to be poorly managed, which is ridiculous.

I really don't feel title development time is unusually slow myrself. This gen started slower mostly because they figured 3rd parties would pick up the slack and then when they didn't show up they had to start projects of their own. I don't feel their development time is too long. Lots of new IPs take a little longer to make just because developers want to get them right, then when their knocking off sequels they're recycling a lot of the same material so development time at that point is usually two years. Most of what Nintendo makes evolves over previous titles enough to warrant a longer development time.

But you're right in that the things they can put out while people wait is often not put out. When Wii U came out with the eShop VC Nintendo should have been poised to have the entire Wii Shop catalog in place, and allow gamers to have instant access to titles they've purchased or at least the option to transfer them all over. Instead, gamers were forced to pay, and only a fraction of the catalog transferred, they left out N64, Genesis, TurboGrafx games, which they should have included. They expanded on the GBA front which is good, but should have gone after GameCube titles as well.

It really irks me that at a time when Nintendo needs more content for their system they do things like acquire the rights to publish Fatal Fame games on the Wii/WiiU and do absolutely nothing with it. Last gen they published Fatal Frame IV and didn't release it outside Japan, at the time it was blamed that the low sales in Japan caused them to reconsider other regions. Now when they need games desperately for their system, they have a very good looking, completed, just needs to be localized for other regions game, and they just sit on their hands. It pisses me off so much. Also, they released Metroid Zero Mission on the GBA VC section of the Wii U eShop in Japan last July, they still haven't released it anywhere else. Baffles me more as I hear the Japanese don't particularly care for Metroid and it's mostly been a western driven interest.

Having no GameCube section bugs me because emulation is completely doable. Wii U doesn't have Homebrew but the Wii U's Wii emulator allows for it, and it allows for GameCube games to be played on it. I only bring it up because if hackers can get GameCube games playing on the Wii U there's no good reason Nintendo can't get it done and allow for GamePad play. Such wasted opportunity.

What also really bugs me is that on the 3DS they don't have SNES or GBA VC games on their eShop. Nintendo had that whole Ambassador Program where they tons of great games on the 3DS for early buyers, including some choice GBA games. Okay, they gave early buyers free games, very nice thing to do. But those same games should be available to later buyers to pay to get. Nope. Like, WTF?!

What bugs me also is they don't have multiple platform cross buys for their games. If you bought Metroid on the Wii Shop, you still have to buy it for the 3DS if you want it on that, not even the option for a partial pay upgrade, and if you transferred rights from your Wii to your Wii U you still need to pay to allow for play on the GamePad. As I build and build my collection on both systems, it's really going to piss me off whenever their next system releases and none of my rights transfer.

Ugh, they really are the only place to play many of the classic Nintendo franchise I've come to love over the years, but beyond that they're very flawed, and unable to keep pace with the rest of the gaming industry when it comes to creating unified accounts, strong and consumer friendly digital rights retention, and their social features are still so 2006. I'm having doubts they might not have it in them to produce another home console after the Wii U. Sure, portables are strong, so they'll probably be making handheld hardware for a long while. But damn, as far as consoles go, they might as well go third party on that end.

Nintendo did make new games you didn't buy them. The wonderful 101 bayonetta 2 pikmin 3 captain toad

The young blood gets ignored at Nintendo. Western gaming culture gets ignored at Nintendo. Both of these groups are where gaming is blossoming.

This is actually not true. For example people were complaining that NoJ decided not to release the regular new 3DS on the US, only to shortly be revealed that it was entirely a NoA business move.

The localization of Xenoblade, Fatal Frame 2, Disaster Day of Crisis, Another Code Wii, Last Story and Pandora's Tower were also 100% business efforts by NoE. (Whoo Europe :D)

Each branch has a considerable amount of control over how they approach their markets. It just so happens that NoA is fucking incompetent. And as amusing as I find Reggie, its probably time for him to leave.

Oh come on, NoE is hardly better considering they released worst packages of Bayonetta 2 in comparison to North America and Japan, and to add, they didn't even release Kirby's Dream Collection unlike NoA and NoJ.

Figures.

"Certainly an interesting move. Iwata is well known to Nintendo fans, far more so than Kimishima, and a changing of the guard may do well for a highly criticized wing of Nintendo's operations. I think "languishing" is a word that best describes NoA in the past few years -- here's hoping a Hot Iwata Injection can perk it up."

How on Earth did you interpret "if the power was to be handed over to younger folks" to mean "elimination or reduction of inefficient managerial bureaucracy"? Did you even read what you're replying to?

Nintendo isn't in "doomed" status like they were a year ago. I think they are on the up. A little.

Nintendo has always been in "doomed" status. Gamers and analysts have been predicting Nintendo's "doom" in almost every single generation of gaming. Even when they were steam-rolling the competition with the NES and Wii, gamers and analysts were still claiming Nintendo is "doomed", let alone during their low-points like the GameCube and Wii U eras.

Meh, they will be fine. Not worried about them.