Sean, just writing to mention that I’m a fan of your Wii writing. I think you’re extremely insightful about the industry.
1) This website and everything on it, including Nintendo, is a hobby. There are no revenue streams here. No ads. It is not generating cashflow. It is purely educational… for MY education! :)
2) Political sphere is what I do in real life.
3) People misinterpret analysis and prediction to think they are the same. They are not. While video game analysts do get paid to predict how many of this or that game will sell, this is more due to gauge the value of individual company’s stock. The problem with the ‘video game’ analysts was not that they were wrong in their predictions (of PS3 doing very well and Wii doing poorly). The problem with the video game analysts is that they were not analyzing Nintendo’s strategy at all. Even when asked directly what Nintendo’s strategy was, they declined to answer saying they don’t know. It is this type of response that I find aggravating and not worthy for the pay of any analyst. Nintendo was very open about their strategy. There was also no mention of previous generations of game consoles prior to Sony’s entry in the market. A good preparation for current analysis is to analyze the past. Do they know how the NES came to market and grew? Did they discuss the Atari 2600? No. Instead, we got talk about how PS3 would succeed because of Blu-Ray. They were more interested in analyzing hardware or the movie formats than the history and nature of video-game consoles. And, of course, there was the successful DS that was in everyone’s face at the time.
My predictions about Nintendo have been incorrect. I thought it would take longer for Wii to succeed than DS. Nintendo is also wrong about their predictions. Some products sell better or worse than what sales projections say.
One of the reasons why I wrote ‘Toast’ was because I was annoyed that there was no real analysis going on. Analysis means what is the strategy in itself? I was reading from the Politico and hearing various TV pundits say the most bizarre things. Examples would be: “Why is McCain going to Pennslyvania? He is simply senile.” That is not analysis. “Palin is going to Iowa to begin her 2012 run.” It is so laughingly absurd. They actually believed the VP candidate went ‘rogue’ and decided to get an early start for the 2012 campaign four years away. It is no wonder these newspapers and tv news shows are going out of business.
The prediction was wrong but the analysis was correct.
Analysis also is not merely putting numbers in boxes. Nate Silver is a perfect example of this. He used other people’s data (public polls) and put numbers in little boxes. Yet, he can’t explain what the strategies were and what is the nature of the electorate.
This is quite common. Political campaigns, as you can imagine, tend to invite sophistry, not analysis, emotion, not thought. For strategists in campaigns, their job is also burdened with the fact that something can come out of the blue and change the nature of everything.
I simply write analysis, either with Nintendo or something else, when I feel no one else is doing it.
4) I wasn’t paying close attention at the time, and relied on some people I thought were smart but apparently were not as smart as they portrayed.
5) Obama himself agreed with my premise when he, himself, said the election was close. However, this was before the stock market drop. The movement of candidates and the movement of advertising money wrote my electoral maps.
6) One thing you will never see is why MANY people were wrong. All these new Democrat registrants never appeared in the voting booths. In fact, it was very much a flat election. Did you know Obama got less votes in Ohio than Kerry did? Of course, McCain got far less, but the 2008 election was very flat despite population growth. But since people think prediction is the same as analysis, they got their prediction right so their ‘analysis’ must also be right. Well, no.
7) It generally is bad taste to put in topics, such as politics, into arenas that they are not about. I mentioned ‘Toast’ right after the election and after the special election in Georgia. All my assertions about incorrect polls, relying on 2006 data where conservatives were staying home, etc. all came true in that special election in Georgia. Polling was off by 5 to 10 points which is quite disasterous. While it remained popular to say that it was close only due to the Obama coat-tails, note that Georgia went to McCain by five points yet neither senator got 50%. In that special election, all these conservative voters emerged from apparently sitting out the general election, making a double digit landslide. Conventional wisdom explanation for that special election being that Obama voters staying home or that ‘it is deep south’ didn’t do the job of explaining what happened there. There is much rhetoric, but very little analysis.
The central part I was wrong was in thinking the conservatives would not stay home in 2008 as they did in 2006. This is why I was wrong about not just Pennslyvania but about many other states as it was the huge amount of conservatives staying home that caused an electoral see-saw. (The bigger issue is that there is a civil war going on inside the Republican Party which has now become much more apparent.)
8) I said that senators make very weak candidates (and presidents). After all, there were only two senators that became president in the 20th century, both died in office. One due to assassination, the other due to sheer stupidity (though, some argue that is also the cause for JFK’s death).
Obama got what is called a ‘Perfect Storm’ that we will be unlikely to see anytime soon. His campaign cash versus McCain was 4 to 1, the most lopsided I’ve ever seen. The stock market plunges in October. There is the typical ‘fatigue’ against the two term president, add with this one with low approval numbers. The Republican Party nominated McCain who is a Judas character to conservatives somewhat like Liebermann is to liberals. Newspapers and traditional media, inevitably going out of business, decide openly to go for Obama.
This was truly a perfect storm for the Democrat candidate. A perfect storm for a Republican candidate would be something like a terrorist attack in October, with a sitting Democrat president, and the Democratic Party had nominated Liebermann as their candidate, and the Republican Candidate has four times the amount of campaign money than the Liebermann candidate. This is what the equivalent of a flip-side of Obama’s perfect storm would be.
And despite that, Obama could only get the states he could. This suggests to me several things, mostly how weak Obama is on the political scene. But it mostly suggests that the states Obama didn’t win are states I don’t think a Democrat presidential candidate will ever win…
9) I’ve curiously been asked to do more posts such as ‘Toast’. So I’ll do a few more and then no more. I am trying to wrap up this website.
I hear talk of ‘political re-alignment’ from retard TV pundits. I don’t think these fools know what a realignment is or what realignments are in history. So there will be a post about this.
Also, there is much talk about demographics and other post-election stuff. Expect a post on this.
It is my rule not to post anything that someone has heard somewhere else. So I expect not only that some of this stuff will be ‘oddly new’, I expect feminists to get angry at my website again. (which is reason enough to post)
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