| Wman1996 said: It's a Catch-22. Nintendo isn't in direct competition with Xbox and PlayStation, but nevertheless there is some overlap. When Nintendo has a lock on third-party and on-par specs, they dominate. NES was mostly unopposed, with the Sega Master System/Mark III being just about the only thing that even was a blip on the radar. SNES was not as dominant, but nevertheless destroyed the PC Engine/TGFX-16 and also outsold the Genesis/Mega Drive globally by a clear margin. If Nintendo catered more to third-parties than they do, Xbox would probably be destroyed, and PlayStation would have its days numbered. There would also be even more gross business practices by Nintendo, most likely. Their draconian policies, especially in the NES days, are documented. It's almost for the balance of all of gaming that Nintendo doesn't have up-to-date specs in the home console market with easy third-party access. Because again if they did, competition would shrink. But you're right, Nintendo still has been really profitable regardless thanks to the popularity of their software and very rarely selling hardware at a loss. Wii U apparently was sold around cost or even a loss for a time. But the sources aren't well-documented there, so if anyone can help that would be nice. It's likely GameCube was selling at a loss for a time when it had a price slash to $99.99 in early 2003. 3DS was also probably selling at least at a small loss in the early days of the price cut. So, you do make a good point that Yamauchi's treatment of third-parties could be seen as a good thing. |
I highly doubt that even if Nintendo did everything right with 3rd party developers with the N64 that PS wouldn't exist. We saw that even with the SNES's perfect 3rd party support, Sega still took a huge chunk of market share from Nintendo and it's difficult to say that Nintendo could've really prevented that when they seemed to do everything right with the SNES, powerful system, great 1st n 3rd party support, ect...
PS whether the N64 was developer friendly or not was gonna be a major competitor to Nintendo, especially with Sony paying developers to make games for their system. Nintendo would then need to force themselves into an expensive bidding war against Sony just to get 3rd party games and way more price cuts to remain competitive which isn't sustainable profit wise compared to just creating you're own market like they have been doing for years now.
