Nintendo is doomed, a personal story.

[pokoko]

RolStoppable said:

pokoko said:

There is no overriding reason why Nintendo cannot compete with Sony and Microsoft while still doing their own thing.  The truth is, they just fail at it.  They should be able to, objectively speaking--they have the money to pull it off--but they always fall short.

There isn't anything limiting about what Sony does.  They just followed what Sega was doing and allowed third-party games to compete with their own while embracing new features.  Nintendo could have done the exact same thing with no damage to their own games.

Nintendo just got beat.  Simple as that.  They got beat with technology, they got beat with features, and they got beat with business acumen.  They could have embraced all of that while producing the exact same games.  There was no trade-off necessary. 

Very incomplete knowledge of video game history. Sony didn't just follow Sega. They picked up Sega's strategy of branding competitors as kiddie, but Sony added other much more significant things. One of them was selling hardware at a loss to offer technology at a lower price. The other was moneyhatting third parties to bring games exclusively to PlayStation or at the very least make PS the only console to get the games. With such aggressive strategies in the early stages, it would eventually pay off in the latter half of a generation (hardware didn't need to be sold at a loss anymore, the high installed base would make third parties pick PS without needing further incentives). It's the typical way of how a big company buys its way into an industry and pushes out smaller competitors.

Sony could break Sega this way, because Sega's financials were only so-so, Sega's own IPs only had limited appeal and because Sega was stupid enough to join Sony's game. Nintendo may have made adjustments in response to Sony's game in the sixth generation, but this is also the time when Microsoft entered, another big company who could buy its way into the business. Microsoft blew $1 billion every year, but that didn't discourage them. When a comparatively small company like Nintendo then decides that they don't want to join this game, then that's not failing at business, but the exact opposite of it. It's their only realistic chance for long term survival.

If you are interested to know how competition between Nintendo and Sony looks like when Sony can't leverage money as a substitute for being an inferior game developer, then you only need to look at handhelds. American and European publishers weren't interested in the direction of handheld gaming, so money incentives from Sony didn't work; it takes two parties: one who offers money, one who accepts it. Because of that, Sony couldn't overwhelm Nintendo with an army of third party support and it became a question of who is the better first party developer. That's the game that Nintendo wins.

Your points about moneyhatting and pushing out smaller competitors seem very strange when you consider that Nintendo locked up North America by forcing third-parties to sign exclusive contracts, a practice that would later be deemed illegal.  You can hardly say Nintendo was the victim of an unfair playing field when they benefited by draconian policies more than anyone.

I mean, you just made a post about how much money Nintendo has made.  They were not a little guy getting bullied; at the time, they were the bully and they had all the advantages.  They had literally crushed retailers who protested their trade practices by refusing to distribute to them, which was doom during the NES days.

No matter how much you want that martyr's shroud, it just doesn't gel with reality.

Nintendo had every chance in the world to compete with the PS1.  There are no excuses in business.