David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…This argument makes a lot of sense. What does this company have anymore? They do have IP that is super valuable, that you should put everywhere, but nobody likes their last console. They can't prove that they've been able to do two consoles in a row. They can't prove that they've been able to leverage their user base into buying the next console literally ever. They can't prove that there's any purpose to everything they learned from the Wii because all that great casual stuff that they learned for the Wii is now happening on smartphones, which they have no play in. It would be very reasonable to be like, you really need to stop making hardware. You have this unbelievable asset, which is some of the world's most valuable IP. Yes. There's a legendary story, which maybe apocryphal and after some more research, I think, actually is apocryphal, but the spirit of it is absolutely on point. Mitch and Blake tell this over on the Gamecraft podcast. At the 2013 shareholder meeting, Iwata is up on stage. He's taking questions from the audience. He gets in an argument with a shareholder, not even an institutional shareholder, just an individual shareholder who's there, who says, hey, my daughter loves playing games on her smartphone, and she loves playing Nintendo games. Why are there no Nintendo games on smartphones? Iwata's mortal honor is offended. He jumps off stage and punches the shareholder in the face. What, really?…

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