Illusion said:
I am sure that most of the arrogance that we are hearing about in this thread from Nintendo came from their leadership during the NES/SNES/N64 era's. Nintendo was on a total power trip during the NES/SNES and did some really horrible stuff. Nintendo even had antitrust crackdowns in the late 80's for monopolistic business practices.
That said, it is clear that the N64 was a big wakeup for Nintendo because the Gamecube was clearly designed to at least try to appease third parties (albeit it was a clumsy effort) and get them back. The Gamecube was touted as being easier to develop for and of course the 1.5 GB mini-DVD's basically eliminated the ROM size limit issues that the N64 had at the cost of Nintendo having to face their fear of piracy/loading times.
By the time the Wii U generation came along, it really seemed like Nintendo was making meaningful efforts to attract third parties. Indie games and the few third party titles that the Wii U got were heavily promoted during Directs. More importantly, I think that by the Wii U era, Nintendo realized that making HD games was far too demanding to do it by themselves, having third parties went from a nice-to-have to becoming essential. Nintendo really got third party support right for the Switch and created a platform that is quite accessible to third parties while stile being innovative in its own right.
In my view, Nintendo heavily values third parties in 2021 and the arrogance of the NES/SNES days is non-existent now. Nintendo realizes that the only way they can fill the release void of their own games (which is still a big issue for the Switch) is by having a stream of major third party releases. Third parties allows Nintendo to spend its time making masterful first party games rather than having to rush software out constantly. Of course, Nintendo makes non-standard hardware that tends to lag its competitors in speed, but I am pretty sure that Nintendo is not doing this out of arrogance towards third parties but because it realizes that the only way it can compete with Sony and Microsoft is by trying to carve out a unique market niche. If Nintendo were to try to compete directly with Sony and MS I do not think they would be able to sell much over 20 million units, and so going with underpowered, non-standard hardware is not Nintendo dismissing third parties, but trying to find the right angle so that they can access the market. As we saw with the Switch, once Nintendo hits gold with their hardware, even third parties like EA who makes a point to give Nintendo absolutely no favors comes back with their tails tucked between their legs.
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This. They made a monopoly in the NES and SNES days. Third parties jumped ship and most haven't looked back
