What would have happened in the PS1 vs. N64 thread if...

[Picko]

LordTheNightKnight said:

Picko said:

thekitchensink said:

Played_Out said:

sc94597 said:

Soleron said:

What happened between SNES and N64 that caused third parties to turn away? Why was Sony, a newcomer, accepted so readily in Nintendo's place?

Nintendo had a policy that only 3-5 games could be made by a publisher, and it can't be shovelware. Developers hated this. That was half of the reason. The other half is that nintendo used Carts in the n64 which were more expensive, and small, but had better load times; while sony had discs which were larger and cheaper,but had longer load times. So developers chose sony.

That's something of a fanboy spin on the situation. In actuality, Nintendo leveraged their market position to charge extortionate fees, and the limit to the number of games publishers could produce wasn't intended to prevent "shovelware" but to give Nintendo a firm stranglehold on the market with their first party product. They also put harsh restrictions on the content of games, which had absolutely nothing to do with quality control (see the Mortal Kombat censorship debacle for evidence).

OT: FF7 could have been released on N64 and it still wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference in Europe. Nintendo had already lost a lot of support in the 16-bit era, and the PSX was the first console to be seen as respectable among young adults.

Incorrect. In fact, the very reason for the gaming crash of the late 70's-early 80's WAS the fact that developers were putting out too much shovelware CRAP on the Atari in an attempt to make a buck. For every decent game that came out for the system, there were 10 direct copies with different sprites and names. Innovation was dead--greed killed it.

Which is why, when the NES came out, Nintendo had their seal of quality, and only allowed a publisher to make three games a year. If you wanted a piece of the action, you had to spend some time and make a GOOD game! Granted, there was shovelware on the NES and SNES, but nowhere near the amount the Atari had. Aside from Nintendo's games, this rule is the reason the two systems were (and are!) so damn popular.

However, once the industry began to pick up again, even when Nintendo lifted the policy, for some reason devs decided to spite them and go with the new guy. In fact, FFVII was originally intended for the N64.

 

You really need to read up on your gaming history. Nintendo were absolute arseholes to other developers during the NES days. There's no ifs, buts or maybes about that.

But they weren't just that way out of the blue. There was good reason to set it up that way. However, once it was, Nintendo did abuse it horribly. Yet Nintendo did drop most of those in the early 1990s, particularly when developers were moving on to the Genesis, once certain policies were already ruled as anti-trust violations. 

Please don't try and justify anti-competitive behaviour. Nintendo's behaviour had nothing to do with saving the videogame industry and everything to do with abusing a monopoly position. Essentially banning third parties from developing for other consoles can in no way be justified.