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GoOnKid on 25 April 2020
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Ka-pi96 said:
GoOnKid said:

Yes and that's the thing. If you were a business who would you trust? A company that established a good relationship with you over quite a period of time or another one from a related but dfferent industry that pushed to enter the same market. It was a risky move by Square, no doubt, but in the end it seemed to pay off. However, perhaps it had been possible to not fuck up Nintendo's relationship at the same time. Other companies had parallel relations with Sega for example, so maybe Square would have been able to do as well. It's impossible to tell nowadays, I guess. But turning FF into a Playstation exclusive was definitely risky and backstabbed Nintendo who seemed pretty surprised by this move. What possible reason could have been there for Square to turn to a newby in the playground and go all in with all games from that moment on. One big reason was obviously the money and another the creative freedom. I'm sure both would have been negotiable with Nintendo as well, however.

It's an interesting story and it ultimately lead to the competitive situation we're in today.

It was risky, although difficult to say how risky. I mean, I don't know how much revenue they were getting from their games with Nintendo, but with money coming in from Sony for making games for them in the first place they surely wouldn't have even needed the same level of sales to make the same amount of money. I expect Sony covered a fair bit of the marketing costs too, saving them some money there too.

You've also got to wonder just how negotiable Nintendo were back then too though. That was an era during which they had incredibly arrogant leadership. Entirely possible that they would've refused to negotiate as they thought Sony weren't serious competition and that after the PlayStation failed Square would come crawling back with their tail between their legs anyway.

Although that said, if games being multi-platform was easy to do back then and had been standard practice then I expect they would have went for that approach instead, or at least attempted to.

Yes, I'm pretty sure Sony pushed the marketing of FFVII to unknown hights and took a major part of the costs. This in turn made the game reach a much bigger audience. Square was able to create the game they envisioned, unbound by storage capacities and with a nice cash boost by Sony. Sony happily made this game their flagship title for the Playstation because they knew what kind of big deal it was. Win win.

I think Nintendo was indeed very strict with third parties, and we all already know why they were that way and how that created the gaming market that we know today. I think they were not ready to let third parties go a little loose at that point. They probably should have trusted them more. Or at least some of them. And this distrust may have been a reason why many third parties turned their backs. However, I find it pretty tasteless and salty by Square to actively convince other third parties to stop developing games for Nintendo. I feel like this is kicking your opponent when he's already down.

At the end of the day I think it was a combination of several reasons. Nintendo, Square and Sony all played a part in this story, so putting the blame into one's shoes like some of the people in this thread are trying to is just too simple. But at the end of the day all of this lead to several new developments: Nintendo's relationship with third parties is nowadays better than ever, Square is desperately trying to reignite Final Fantasy's magic and doesn't understand what made it big anymore, Nintendo publishes most of Square's Wii, DS, 3DS and Switch games, and Sony became a major player in the gaming industry.