fordy said:
mutantclown said:
Apparently Nintendo never aspires to something bigger, they're pretty much content with what they do, and if it were for them we would still be playing cartridges. They only care about creating new controllers for all I can see, and then they make a few games that really exploit the potential of them throughout a whole 5 year cycle, and always expect third parties will give a damn and do the same, but really few of them do.
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Taking the jump to CD in the 32bit era was a HUGE gamble, and it wasn't that Nintendo doesn't aspire to become bigger. After all, they didn't become the dominant marketshare from sitting back and doing nothing on their NES and SNES consoles. The fact of the matter was that moving your established system to CD was a HUGE gamble, despite the size and cost benefits, Nintendo's concern was piracy, something they went as far as to put a microprocessor in each cartridge in the NES and SNES in order to thwart it. CDs also suffered from incredibly shocking access times, whereas at least with the Famicom and the FDS, they had the cartridge slot to fall back on. Nintendo saw what happened with the SegaCD and it spooked the hell out of them to make a system that only used CDs, which until up to that point, was a market failure in the games industry until the PlayStation came around.
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That's true, but the only, really, the only rationale for Nintendo's decisions is always the following : is it alright for OUR games? it is? good, screw everybody else. Cartridges were a pretty lucrative business for them too, and they were still the market leaders, so if anyone wanted to publish a game they would have to bow to the almighty Nintendo, concede to their demands and pay them big royalties for having the luxury of having their game on their platform. 18 years later, they still think that way. Hiroshi Yamauchi always said Nintendo consoles are for Nintendo games, everything else brought by third parties was secondary, in their minds it was third parties that had to come to Nintendo, not the other way around. That's been Nintendo's erred philosophy forever.
