Email: Falafelkid and Lost Garden

Hi Malstrom,

As a reader of your blog and with the news that you are stopping your blog soon, I thought that you could alert your readers to other content that is similar to yours.The first one is Falafelkid blog http://nintendo-revolution.blogspot.com/  .
This was one of the first  blog that I found that seemed to get how the Revolution (Wii) was going to change video games. His current post a review of the year sums up your message on the birdmen 
that make up the games industry 

“I also argued that a lot of Western gamers keen on traditional games wrongly saw the Wii as carving its own niche, 
not realising that they themselves had become the niche and Nintendo’s ‘Touch Generations’ titles now formed the mainstream of videogames”

He is also good for links to other blogs, its how i found both gonintendo and lost garden there. Lost garden is a very insightful writer on the games industry with posts like the difference between Nintendo’s product led company and Microsoft’s platform led company   http://lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html

why nintendogs is a game, why convergent devices such as the psp don’t succeed and how indie games can learn from touring bands to make a profit http://lostgarden.com/labels/Worth 20Reading.html as well as his latest post about the Princess saving app how software programmes can learn from videogames ie spore does 95% of what Maya can do but is easier to learn and has sold more by appealing  to a wider audience 
http://lostgarden.com/2008/10/princess-rescuing-application-slides.html

I always look forward to your new posts and will miss your blog when it stops. Until then keep up the good work.

Yours sincerely 
Terry Reynolds 

Hi Terry,

Falafelkid is a game journalist in Europe (who, when seeing the different colors of ‘Revolution’ consoles revealed at E3 2005, is the only person I know who expressed desire to get the LIME GREEN one! Based on this, we cannot be too sure about Falafelkid! [just joking]). His site has been around longer than mine. He was a very good game journalist smacking down rumors and investigating them during the ‘Revolution’ period. He was also the journalist that interviewed Miyamato when he revealed that Twilight Princess would be motion controlled.

So no, Falafelkid is not copy anything.

There really isn’t any Malstrom content to copy anyway. All I do here is take Nintendo’s actions and connect it to their stated strategy. The Blue Ocean Strategy belongs to the Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption belongs to the Harvard Business School. Since anyone can say anything on the Internet, (i.e. everyone has an ‘opinion), I stuff the articles full of quotes from Nintendo execs and various other people to show this is not some dude’s ‘opinion’, this is what is actually what Nintendo has stated they intend to do.

Lost Garden doesn’t seem interested in business aspects so the site isn’t interesting to me. (I rarely read any game industry commentary or forums anymore.)

I’ll still be around for a little while longer. But I intend to wrap everything up in 2009.

Thanks for the email!