Nintendo announced today that after many successful years in the gaming hardware business, they have finally decided to cave to the misguided opinions of a few outspoken armchair "experts" and unsupportive non-fans. Starting today, they will be following in the footsteps of their former rival Sega by abandoning all current and future hardware strategies.

"We greatly regret not listening to our critics sooner", Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said in an exclusive interview. "It is our sincere hope that they will continue to not buy our games, even after we release them on the requested Sony and Microsoft platforms."

According to Iwata, Nintendo's future business plan is simply to mirror Sega's business arc since the moment they decided to abandon gaming hardware. This plan was presented as four distinct phases.

The first phase will involve shifting all titles currently in development over to one exclusive underperforming platform. This means that fans can soon look forward to enjoying such games as Splatoon, Yoshi's Wooly World, as well as the new Star Fox and Legend Of Zelda games only on PlayStation Vita.

Phase 2 will see Nintendo finally begin to create new games for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. At the same time however, Nintendo will strive to cut mounting development costs and make up for lost revenue by consolidating and/or shutting down several internal game development studios, and by laying off key people. This will include shuttering popular studios like Kirby dev HAL Laboratory and Fire Emblem custodian Intelligent Systems. Also expect to see the forced retirement of legendary gaming icon and Mario creator, Shigeru Miyamoto.

Phase 3 will kick off with a now struggling-to-survive Nintendo being forced to merge with a pachinko company. Nintendo will use some of the new found capital from this merger to buy up a few lackluster 3rd party developers. They will then put these new studios to work creating poorly made games based on old secondary Nintendo properties and super hero movie adaptations.

Nintendo itself will start putting out annual Super Mario releases of successively diminishing quality. Furthermore, Nintendo will put a greater focus on publishing, including pushing out half-finished games by independent developers like Gearbox. These practices will continue on for a while, seeing Nintendo hemorrhage cash at an alarming rate.

The final phase will begin with Nintendo initiating another major restructuring and announcing a shift in focus, primarily to mobile gaming. That is as far as Nintendo has announced of their future plans, though based on these revelations, it's probably a safe assumption that whatever Sega decides to do next is what Nintendo will soon follow.

Although these announcements are sure to upset and confound investors and Nintendo fans alike, it's important to remember that some gamers who don't like Nintendo and don't play their games have been asking for this for years. While the majority of us are left scratching our heads and wondering why,  we can all take comfort in the knowledge that a small but vocal, yet totally indifferent group of people on the internet will be collectively exclaiming, "It's about time!"

[Image: Nintendo]