Cammie Dunaway leaves Nintendo

What to make of this?

There are many reasons why a VP of Nintendo will leave the company. One of the more interesting ones is because if they break confidentiality and blab stuff they shouldn’t have. Another big reason is that the video game business is ferociously difficult and topsy-turvy. And another more likely reason is that when sales go down, the axe falls on the marketing person. It could be for any or all of these reasons. However, if Nintendo really wanted her to stay, she would still be there.

As I understand it, Reggie is the decision maker who hired both Dunaway and Kaigler. They were hired because they knew ‘disruption’. Dunaway’s experience at Yahoo, which Reggie probably thought was a ‘disruptive company’, and Dunaway also being female (to market for the ‘new market’). It is likely she was a big advocate for ‘user generated content’.

I agree with those who say Dunaway didn’t seem to be the type to belong in the gaming atmosphere. Those who favor disruption tend to place too much emphasis on computers and Internet forgetting that it was gaming that is the mother of personal computers (before starting Apple, Steve Jobs worked at Atari). Gaming is completely different than computer businesses and Internet businesses. I would say sister industries to gaming would be anything related to sports and the usual suspects of entertainment industries (music, books, television, etc).

This is a healthy sign when VPs get replaced. Disruption literature says that the people who ought to get the axe are not the people at the bottom and especially not the customer service and people developing the next generation of the product. It is the people at the top who should go. It is human nature, when looking to get rid of someone in the company, to not look at oneself and to look down below you. This is why many companies get trapped in a cycle of continued destruction because the top people stay and they keep getting rid of people below them.

Knowledge of disruption isn’t going to cut it for future VPs. They need to be gamers at heart. In a way, a marketer for gaming should view himself not so much as a marketer but as a shepherd or high priest leading a movement to ‘convert’ scores of non-gamers into gamers. It is someone passionate about gaming.

Anyway, here is Dunaway running into the first goomba in Mario 5. During the NES days, people would make fun of you if you ran into the first goomba. Run into the second goomba. Or the third. But never the first.