David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Make really fun games on hardware that pushes the envelope on what types of experiences are possible for people. I think if they get a bee in their bonnet about a new hardware idea that they think is groundbreaking and will enable a whole bunch of new game experiences, they're going to do that, and then they will figure out the business model implications later. I think the thing that is a little scary, and we'll see how much this is imprinted on Nintendo, the Wii U debacle and when smartphones came out, really existentially challenged Nintendo for the first time ever. They could afford to have that philosophy during the 90s and the 2000s. They had the handheld business to save them every time. They could do whatever the hell they wanted, and It was fine. There was no existential risk. We've seen now, even with all the incredible success from the Switch and the $5 billion of annual operating income that they're generating right now, they're in a much more precarious position. If they don't get things right, consumers will just leave and go back to mobile. They can't do another Wii U. Now we're full-on in bull and bear. Let's just pull that forward and do it now. This is one of Matthew Ball's point on the bear case, which is everyone's all hot on the Switch as the best selling console Nintendo has ever done, blah-blah-blah. But really, it's not one console, it's two because it cannibalized their other business line. You have to look at not how's it doing against the Wii, how's it doing against the Wii plus the DS, or the NES plus the Gameboy. That really puts it in a different perspective where they have no backup plan. They can't move forward in one while keeping the other one stable. They now have one platform for better or for worse, and they really can't screw it up.…

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