Some may not believe me when I say that game journalists were routinely telling Nintendo how to make video-games and some told Iwata how he should make the successor to the Gamecube (and when the Wii was revealed, at each stage, game journalists kept saying how ‘wrong’ Nintendo was). Some do not believe me. “Malstrom, a game journalist wouldn’t tell a head of a billion dollar corporation how to run it. They wouldn’t tell Miyamoto how to make games.” But they do!

Here is a good example of a current story doing the same: Is Nintendo too scared to enter online gaming?

The first thing Nintendo has to do, is take some small risks, for example, instead of using those annoying friend-codes, let us make our own Wii-code, similar to the ones that Xbox-live and PSN use. We all know that the friend-codes get extremely annoying, especially when you have individual friend-codes for every single online game on the console. Nintendo is trying to keep us safe, but there aren’t any stories of children getting molested by playing with a random person on Xbox-Live. Parents can very easily enforce the rule of, “no playing online.” If parents really didn’t want their kid playing with random people, they should be the ones to enforce it, not Nintendo.

Why would Nintendo want to emulate an online system that isn’t selling consoles? This question is not asked in the page. But nevertheless, the writer talks of Nintendo as if they were completely incompetent and that, if they only follow the author’s advice, they will have solved their problem.

These type of articles were very common in the Gamecube days. It was odd seeing game journalists, in interviews with Iwata, tell him what he should do. I remember one about the upcoming DS and the game journalist announced he thought Nintendo was not only going the wrong way but that they should make their next handheld play Gamecube games. How successful do you think such a product would have made? There are reasons why Iwata is president and the game journalist is not.

To their credit, Wired has officially confessed their error in doing this. We read:

In January 2003, when we last spoke to Nintendo’s secret weapon, lead designer Shigeru Miyamoto, we urged him to start making games with a “grown-up aesthetic” — you know, something like Grand Theft Auto. Thankfully, he ignored us. With more than 20 million Wii consoles sold, Nintendo is now winning the videogame wars. This time, we asked Miyamoto what he thinks.

I am glad we can now agree that Miyamoto and Iwata are smarter than game journalists on how to make games and run Nintendo. Progess is being made!