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johntonsoup on 24 January 2008
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HappySqurriel said:
johntonsoup said:
Nintendo was awful during that period. I hope to never see a console manufacturer as arrogant and belligerent as Nintendo was during the 80s, early 90s. Sony's amazing rise was I think almost exclusively because they had better relations with developers and publishers. Every major developer for Nintendo bolted as soon as they could.

If Wii's success leads us back to that era, gamers lose. On a more positive note, I think they learned their lesson. By all accounts, they are much easier to work with now.

Yes and no ...

Nintendo created a set of rules in order to prevent the same conditions that produced the videogame crash of the mid 1980's from ever happening again. If publishers were given free reign (at that time) to produce as much as they wanted to, all that would happen is they would flood the market with buggly third rate low quality clones of popular games.

In the 1990's Nintendo faced a new problem in that parents were starting to worry about the type of content their children were being exposed to, and they tried to protect themself by limiting how violent content was produced for their system; at the same time Nintendo was one of the main companies producing the ESRB and when they were up and running Nintendo eased their restrictions and made an ESRB rating a condition of being licenced by Nintendo.

 

In otherwords, a lot of what people hate about Nintendo in the 80s and 90s was a necessary reaction to the time; Nintendo's "dink like" behavior basically ensured their survival and the survival of the industry.


 Lots of good points in that. I disagree with the content part of your post, since it is usually alleged that Nintendo stoked the flames of content monitoring against Sega.

At some point however, they lost touch. I'm just pointing out that at that time, gamers lost innovation and had to deal with censorship etc. I think we are better off because they were shown the hard way that they cannot rule their 3rd party developers with an iron fist.