Nintendo banned Square from their offices for 10 years after FFVII went to PlayStation. EDIT: japanese business model is akin to Yakuza

[The_Liquid_Laser]

HollyGamer said:

padib said:

This article is very old. I read it almost last year. This thread is very biased against Nintendo (I have no ill towards OP, just stating the truth about the content), you have to understand that Nintendo and Square were in an almost exclusive relationship. If you read the article it's clear that basically they were only producing for Nintendo, not Sega, not Neo Geo, not anybody else.

"[In September 1995] I was hired by the president of the company, [Tetsuo] Mizuno-san, and he told me that, “Squaresoft will always be with Nintendo. … As long as you work for us, it’s basically the same as working for Nintendo.” And the week after I joined, they started saying, “Oh, maybe we should switch to Sony.” So I was kind of shocked."

Nintendo published Final Fantasy in the US, and helped promote the jRPG in the west. If you read the article, you would know that making jRPGs mainstream in the west was a gargantuan task. Nintendo didn't succeed what Sony succeeded in doing, but they very much helped the brand in its infancy, when Square was producing its final ... fantasy game. They were going bankrupt. Put simply, Square was almost a 2nd party to Nintendo, and they cheated on Nintendo because Nintendo was being a bad boyfriend, in relationship terms basically is it in a nutshell. These topics are sensitive, as the article mentions:

Hironobu Sakaguchi

Producer and executive vice president, Square Japan; Chairman and chief executive officer, Square USA

When we made our decision, the president of Square [Masafumi Miyamoto], our lead programmer [Ken Narita] and I went to a meeting with Yamauchi-san. There is an old cultural tradition where, in Kyoto, someone will welcome you with tea, but you’re not supposed to really drink that tea. It’s just polite to have it there. And Yamauchi-san welcomed us with a very expensive bento meal and beer, and gave us a very nice welcome and basically patted us on the back to say, “I wish you the best.” No bitter feelings or anything.

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

I think [Sakaguchi] is just trying to be politically correct with that one.

Yoshihiro Maruyama

Executive vice president, Square U.S.

I don’t think [anyone from Nintendo gave us a hard time]. They said, “Oh, we don’t need that.” That’s what they said. [Laughs] Their philosophy has always been that Nintendo hardware is for their games, and if a publisher wants to publish, “OK you can do it.” But if you don’t like it, “We don’t want you.”

Hiroshi Kawai

Character programmer, Square Japan

What I heard was Nintendo said, “If you’re leaving us, never come back.”

[Note: In October 2001, then Square president Hisashi Suzuki said in an interview that Nintendo became especially frustrated not when Square left, but later when Square helped convince others, such as Enix, to leave as well. Suzuki declined an interview request for this story.]

These tweets are bad press towards Nintendo and only serve to prop up Polygon. I very much loved their article but this is in very bad taste and they should apologize to both Square and Nintendo for this stunt.

The state of journalism is very bad it seems.

Actually Nintendo was bad at that time and 99% developer and game publisher agree . This article not picking any side just stating a real fact. Even Nintendo employee agree and another prove isNintendo has changed a lot since then, which great. 

This happen on N64 and FF7 decisison , before that (SNES) it's  diffrent story. 

"Bad" is very subjective.  The most consumer friendly company I've ever encountered in all of gaming was Nintendo in the 80s.  And console gaming would not even exist if it were not for Yamauchi.  On the other hand the third party company that always hated them the most was EA, which happens to be the least consumer friendly company in all of gaming.

There are always at least two sides to every story.  And often time being "hard on third parties" actually means being "aggressively pro-consumer".