Are Nintendo anti-conformist hipsters or visionary innovators?

Nintendo has a history of doing things differently, from sticking with cartridges on the Nintendo 64 to the Nintendo Switch being an underpowered home-console/handheld hybrid with detachable controllers. The question then becomes, "Are they a bunch of hipsters who do things differently for the sake of wanting to feel special and different, or do they do things differently because they are visionary innovators?"

One of their former presidents: Hiroshi Yamauchi, criticized people who played RPGs, which were some of the most popular games in his own country, saying they were played by
“depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games.”
Was the Nintendo 64 an answer to the glut of single-player RPGs on the Super Famicom? Was the Nintendo 64 designed to be an action-game machine for local multiplayer gaming at his behest? It's certainly possible.

When Yamauchi passed the torch to Satoru Iwata, Iwata took his predecessor's mantras very seriously - even mentioning the company's philosophy of uniqueness ("doke-so") during a pre-E3 Nintendo Direct in 2012.

It is good to be unique, but there is a time and place for it. It is also good to be the same. Being the same as another is not necessarily bad. We are all people. Are we bad? Are we boring? Sure, some people want to feel special and different, and so they become hipsters, but is that really the best course of action? Of course, having the freedom to choose between being a hipster or being the same is very important, but as a business, being stubbornly different is not necessarily the best thing.

Let's look at the Kinect for Xbox One. Don Mattrick foolishly pushed it onto every Xbox One at launch. Not only was the Xbox One less powerful than the PlayStation 4, it was also 100 dollars more expensive. The Kinect was dropped, and sales went up.

Conversely, Nintendo pushed the Wii U Gamepad with every Wii U hardware-bundle, but, unlike Microsoft, they never released a SKU without the Wii U Gamepad. They stubbornly refused to abandon the device, even though its inclusion bumped the price up 100 dollars, just like the Kinect did.

From an artistic standpoint, it was the right move by Nintendo to stick with the Gamepad. I respect them, and amazing masterpieces like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker came out of their commitment to the innovative controller. On the other hand, it cost them dearly on the business-side of things.

I don't think Nintendo are strictly either anti-conformist hipsters or visionary innovators. I believe that they fall somewhere in the middle. They just need to continue to balance vision, pride, and economics for the future.

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