>>183506
He's correct, though Japan's corporate culture of stuffiness and doing things just because "that's how we've always done them" obviously makes it hard for them to adapt to the modern social media landscape. Some indie developers in the West have had success in using memes to generate sales and reputation, which in my experience are often the ones that support mods: Rivals of Aether's workshop is basically a tool to let people make a shitpost into a real playable character, for instance, which greatly extended the lifespan of what was otherwise a pretty ugly Smash Bros Melee clone. Hollow Knight, though a good game in its own right, has a dedicated community of challenge runners and speed runners (and trannies) because it's pretty easy to make custom levels and custom weapons.
Given how Nintendo treats mods like they're the work of the devil, and certain challenge runs like they're literally hacking (nuzlocke Pokemon runs, for instance), I can imagine a lot of conflict between a 70-year-old salaryman giving orders to his subordinates and the reception of those orders among the wider internet culture. Even when something genuinely innovative and cool is made, there's no guarantee that the people responsible for its distribution and promotion are going to take the risks necessary to help it succeed. Especially not when you can just tell normalfags "X thing is cool" for a week and have most of them believe it, which is how Apex Legends became successful.
>>183510
It's true that not giving a fuck helps a lot - look at Hideki Kamiya and his famous use of Twitter's block button - but Sakurai is perceptive enough to identify the real problem: even if the actual impact of Twitter bots and idiots is nothing, the perceived impact of it, and the threat of the perceived impact, is often enough to get normalfags to self-censor and otherwise compromise on things that might be controversial. The panopticon affects everything it sees, even if the guard isn't looking.