Nintendo is the only one who has balls

[famousringo]

mai said:

1) "Electronic Arts's relationship with Sega produced significant rewards for both companies. Genesis quickly became a lucrative new outlet for Electronic Arts, and Sega benefited from having a line of sophisticated games that appealed to and older audience more than most games on the NES.

Nintendo approached Electronic Arts about making games for NES in the mid-1980s, long before Sega announced Genesis. But Hawkins did not want to make games for the eight-bit console. He and many other Electronic Arts board members felt that NES was not powerful enough to run their computer games and they did not want to downgrade their games to run on it. Like many people at the time, Hawkins was openly disdainful of console games and critical of Nintendo's chances of success", -- The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent, p. 409.

Familiar rhetorics, isn't it? "Older audience", "not powerful enough", "do not want to downgrade" etc. He never really changed his stance on Nintendo and console in general to a lesser extent despite being proven wrong. For the record if you think Steven Kent is some sort of Nintendo-worshipper, he really isn't. He was openly critical about the Wii, thought it'd fail (many thought that way though), when was proven wrong was quoted to say smth like "I pity that people weren't smart enough not to buy this piece of shit", -- or smth along those lines.

2) When I was more interested in the subject VGC is dealing with, I did this chart. These are revenues from video game publishing on all relevant consoles at the time:

I still have methodology for this and links on the sources (though links might be broken by now). I went over trouble to check every fiscal report of major publishers back then and make them consistent (different fiscal periods, GAAP vs. Non-GAAP, currency conversion etc., no inflation depreciation though). The most questionable numbers are "Others" as I took them from VGC directly.

So to put this chart into words, Nintendo used to be HUGE, every fourth buck made in the biz was made by Nintendo just on two consoles versus sixth of them for the rest of the publishers, or two put it differently in 2009 Nintendo was as big as four it's biggest contenders put together. Nintendo potentionally could be literally not-reliant on third parties at all, the only way to convience third parties to make a consistent publishing business on Nintendo hardware is to make Nintendo hardware dominant by Nintendo software. Sony cannot do that, not even close, while Nintendo theoretically still could that.

The most awesome post I've seen here in a while. I've been saying for some time that Nintendo was the most successful publisher of the generation, but this is the first time I've seen it visualized in such stark terms.

This is why the publishers want to kill Nintendo, folks. Don't listen to any of the BS about power or demographics. In an era of intense consolidation of publishers, Nintendo's software revenues and profits were absolutely terrifying.