DonFerrari said:
foxtail said:
@bold It's not like Nintendo didn't try to help 3rd party games like Final Fantasy sell. Nintendo's official magazine, Nintendo Power (which had a paid subscription base of over 1.5 million at the time), dedicated a whole issue solely to the original Final Fantasy and was a complete guide to the game.
Nintendo and Square had fairly close relations back then, Squaresoft (the US subsidiary of Square) had headquarters that were located next to Nintendo of America headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
@italic There were some differences betweeen Sony's shares in Square, and Nintendo's shares in Rare. Square was a publicly traded company, while Rare was not. Sony purchased a 18.6% stake in Square (which was prior to the Square merger with Enix [it went down to 8.4% after the Square-Enix merger]), Nintnedo's ownership of Rare was 49%.
The Sony purchase of Square stock happened in late 2001. Square was looking to recoup some of it's losses from the production of it's expensive CGI movie "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", which was distributed by Sony/Columbia Pictures. The Sony investment in Square stock was 14.9 billion yen (~$124 million), the production costs for the movie (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) was 16.4 billion yen (~$137 million).
If Square never made the movie they wouldn't have needed the investment from Sony.
In 2014 Sony sold all its shares in Square Enix to Nikko Securities Inc for 15.3 billion yen.
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So your example of Nintendo having great relationship with 3rd parties is one single case? Have your heard of the draconian laws nintendo had with 3rd parties during the NES and SNES? Like total exclusivity with 0 paycheck, just a if you publish anywhere else you can't publish with us? We determine what and when you can publish, etc?
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I mentioned Final Fantasy (and Square) specifically because it was being talked about, but 3rd party games were often the focus of Nintendo Power.
Above are just some examples of familiar 3rd party series (Megaman, Final Fantasy, Contra, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, Street Fighter) that were highlighted in the Nintendo magazine.
The exclusivity deals as reported before was that third parties were allowed to move their games to other platform afters two years time. Nintendo did have a rule in the US where publishers could only release 5 games per year on the NES, but that rule didn't apply in Japan. Any enterprising company could get around that rule like Konami did by creating a shell company, and in the US Konami's was Ultra Games. This 5 game rule was made at a time when cheap/poorly made games were easy to make on the NES, and they didn't want a repeat of what happened to Atari. They got rid of that rule some time after with the SNES.
