Check out this story. Someone was asking stupid questions at a Nintendo investor conference, and journalists are now beginning to notice. There have always been stupid questions. Why are journalists noticing them now?
Something has dramatically changed from five years ago. Five years ago, that story would not be written because no one read the Nintendo investor questions. And if they did, they only reported the game related information. This is fine for gaming media to do.
There has been much greater interest in the business workings of Nintendo today than there was five years ago. In the same way, there is more interest in the business workings of gaming than there was five years ago. I remember having to struggle to say how the video game business makes excellent business theater with how volatile it is. Perhaps the Wii woke people up to this. The more one studies the business history of video games, the more interesting it gets.
I hope to see in the future that gamers, all forms of gamers, being comfortable on the business side of things while movie fans and music fans remain the idiots they are. Let gamers take over the world.
In 2006 and 2007, you can tell why I was so frustrated when Nintendo would keep talking about the Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption and no one would talk about what those things were. I don’t expect gaming sites to get into that, but I do expect game business sites to get into it. Even when the Wii became very successful, no one wanted to talk about it!
But now, things are different. I think gamers are far more ‘informed’ and ‘aware’ of the business side of things than they used to be. This is bad news for Michael Pachter and the Game Industry. But it is good news for gaming.
Too many gamers want to become game developers. We need gamers to want to take charge of the gaming businesses. The history of gaming has had the business guys come outside of gaming which perhaps explains the volatile nature of the business. A native gamer would likely have a more consistent and growing operation of these gaming businesses. I would also like to see native gamers become the marketers. I am tired of the marketers and business guys get into gaming after they got their jobs. That is like running a music company and only listening to music after you got the job. Or running a movie company and watching movies only after you got the job.
It’s amusing how people are surprised about Iwata’s response to the charity question (and how that question would be stricken from the records). This is actually extremely common in the business world… at least for the long established companies. Businesses do give to charity, but there is no record about it. Charity is very important because you cannot make money if you do not give it away.
It is amazing what we ‘business mundanes’ do about the context of business. Many of us wrongly look at business from a political lens (liberal or conservative). Or they look at business as a noble ideal. It is neither noble or evil. It just is.
Oratory is not good or bad, it is just is. There are good orators who can cause the crowd to rise up and do great things. Then there are bad orators such as Hitler who do very bad things. But oratory is not bad because of a Hitler and is not noble because of a Demothenes. It just is.
And business just is. There are good businessmen, and there are evil businessmen. In your experience of work, you have seen good employees and bad employees who steal from the shop owner.
Business operates by a different context than the employee context we all are taught at school and live with our lives. You believe money is something of great value. In fact, you donate your time more than you donate your money because money is more valuable to you.
But in the business context, this is reversed. Time has far more value than money. It is extremely easy to get businesses to donate money to charity. I can get money from Bill Gates. But I cannot get his time. It is extremely difficult to get time from these sorts of people.
You can make more money. But you cannot make more time. You can borrow money from a bank. But you cannot borrow time from anyone. The business context, I have witnessed, adopts that time is the true scarcity. We have a few decades on this Earth and that is that. Money’s only true value is that it buys time. With enough money, you do not have to work anymore. Look at how much time you now had added to your life.
I wonder if anyone at the Nintendo Investor Q/A asked about Apple. That would be yet another stupid question asked over and over and over again. These investors do not populate a higher plane of existence. They are just like you. However, they have a different context and process due to the business mentality. There are stupid investors and smart investors. I just marvel at how so many of the stupid ones get to ask questions at the Nintendo Investor Q/A.