Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan Takes A Bow 42
The MTV Multiplayer blog is playing host to a two-part interview with outgoing Nintendo president of marketing Perrin Kaplan. A well-respected figure in the games business, Kaplan's 'exit interview' with Stephen Totilo touches on everything from the missing September surprise to why the US doesn't have a fan club. "You know we've taken a really close look at what they're doing in Europe and what they're doing in Japan. You have to remember that, geographically, we're much bigger here and cost-wise, it is much more expensive to run a program like that. We try to do pre-sale with our retailers as often as possible. You're talking about a scale that is much larger. But we do look at the differences in markets and what consumers are liking. It's just a difference in scale." Good luck to Ms. Kaplan in her future endeavors.
Re:Terrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Tough Love. (Score:5, Insightful)
You could get away with calling me a fanboy.
It is because of this that with great sadness that I make the following complaint. Why is Nintendo so hesitant to acknowledge, let alone correct glaring mistakes?
Friendcodes are stupid. A solid online experience isn't *that* hard, especially when you have solid examples to reference.
Admit that there is a storage problem with the Wii, and for the love of god at least say that a USB hard drive is in development. Tell us that games will be playable directly from SD.
This isn't rocket science, and it's not a recent issue.
Anyone else remember the great Mortal Kombat debacle? You know, the whole attitude that violent games don't belong on Nintendo systems? That really didn't work out so well for them, and so they've changed policy. It took years, but it happened.
This isn't "end of the world" stuff, but seriously. It's not that hard, and when your systems are practically printing money, you would think issues like this would get resolved. And ignorance isn't an issue; just as in this interview, and countless others, these issues are raised time and time again.
Hell, if they tossed an intern on customer satisfaction duty and had him read stories and comments on Joystiq, Slashdot, Kotaku, and Destructoid all day, it would do wonders for customer satisfaction, if only that feedback could somehow factor into decision making.
I still love you, Nintendo. We just need to have a talk.
Re:Terrible (Score:4, Insightful)
Well yeah, but that's a tautology. I was a Sony fan, but not a "fanboy", and the PS3 has basically turned me right off the brand. Not for the price, but the lack of compelling titles. Now I'm an Xbox fan.
Nintendo, on the other hand, creates crazed brand zealots -- and I mean in the good kind of way, in the Apple kind of way. That takes significantly more than just a big game catalog, and in fact Nintendo pulled it off with a rather small one. I'm not by any means a Nintendo fan, but I sure can appreciate their ability to build a brand.
Re:Tough Love. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what's sader (Score:3, Insightful)
(Doesn't matter anyways, in 5 years we'll have SpikeGMTV)