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TheRealSamusAran on 29 April 2025
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pokoko said:

It's kind of amazing that people have bought the "Nintendo saved gaming" thing when what they actually did was lock Sega and others out of the US market by requiring developers to sign exclusivity contracts. They didn't save gaming, they just made it look that way.

Really, Sega needs to be mentioned here because they were the first to fight against some of Nintendo's anti-consumer practices and pave the way for the rise of third party publishers and developers, which then helped to create the perfect storm of the original PlayStation. Yes, Sega laid the groundwork that Sony took advantage of much more successfully. Ironically, EA was very instrumental in that and had a positive influence on the future of gaming.

The most important thing Nintendo did was to require that code be submitted and approved for any game that appeared on their hardware. It didn't have to be GOOD but it did have to WORK. A lot of the other stuff was so that they could keep a monopoly but the code approval part solved the problem of completely broken games that plagued many of the early systems.

Sony's biggest contribution was much more simple but it also changed the industry. They went to the publishers and developers and listened to what they had to say. At the time, Nintendo dictated everything and ruled over third-parties with an iron fist. Sony went in the opposite direction, which is why they received so much support.

Microsoft's biggest contribution is that they completely embraced DLC. I doubt the entire scene of expansions, cosmetics, or even patches would be nearly as robust now without their inclusion in the industry.

While I usually prefer a more hands off approach, the market *needed* Nintendo's iron fist in the 80's. The very reason why it crashed in the first place wasn't bad consoles, it was bad, extremely bad software, and Nintendo came in to fix that. Hell, one of the policies that software partners had to follow was that they could only release X games per year (it was like 5 or 10, really not a big number), and you can't tell me they did that to create a monopoly, they did that because they wanted their partners to focus on quality over flooding the market with shovelware, leading to another crash.

The only monopolistic thing they did was the exclusivity contracts, prohibiting their partners to release games on other consoles, which of course was monopolistic af, but it's not like that was keeping other companies out of the market. Truth is, back in the 80's, no one could compete with Nintendo anyway, it was like Steam versus other PC game stores nowadays.

And what anti-consumer practices were Nintendo doing in the 80's and even in the 90's exactly? Are you confusing anti-consumer with anti-competition?