As everyone continues to reel in response to Nintendo’s reduced financial forecast, American game designer David Jaffe has rushed to their defense.
The man behind Twisted Metal and God of War turned to Twitter to voice his argument against those calling for Satoru Iwata to step down from his role as Nintendo’s president, explaining that without failure you can never have the opportunity to celebrate greater successes, most notably as the company achieved with the Wii.
“Do I think – for my own selfish reasons regarding stuff I like – that I would love to hear about Nintendo selling to Disney? Yep! But folks calling for Iwata to step down miss sight of what makes Nintendo great,” Jaffe wrote. “You’d never get the Wii type successes if you don’t allow a guy like Iwata to fail hard as well.”
As his followers began to respond, Jaffe continued his reasoning: “Sorry, I mean that failure can be a sign that a person has lost ‘it’ and needs to go OR a sign that a person is still very much relevant and has tons of great work left in them but is taking the same sorts of chances that – in the past – have lead to great successes but are now – temporarily – leading to some failures.
“You MUST fail if you want to grow and have new successes. My point is, you WANT a person who fails for these latter reasons and you want to lose one who fails for the initial reasons. I feel Iwata is the latter and he’s certainly earned the right to fail more than he has to this point. And that’s from a gamer AND stockholder perspective. If you wanna make money, back the folks who fail properly.”
[Thanks GoNintendo]
David Jaffe voices his defense of Nintendo
