Hey guys
I was just browsing vgchartz and ended up in this thread titled who has been the most influential third party developer?
I answered Square and suddenly epiphany struck me.
Why?
Lets see.
#1 Nintendo itself is the reason why so many people see Nintendo as a toy company
Back during the videogame crisis Nintendo obviously saved the gaming industry with its NES.
It worked because other than the competition Nintendo marketed the NES as a toy (that came with a robot) and not as a home computer. And since it is somewhat IN to hate Nintendo their games have mass-appeal and Nintendo games to this date have a charming palette of colors people associate it with toys and children.
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#2 Nintendo made Playstation
As almost everyone knows Nintendo had a partnership with Sony.
The "short" story goes that Nintendo betrayed Sony but its not that easy. Is a little bit more complex.
Nintendo ignored or didn't really read/understand what the contract said and later found out that Sony demanded the rights to every Game that would come to the CD-system. So you either waste the money you already invested and somewhat break the contract with Sony or you cant put Mario, Zelda, Metroid or any other game you have on a CD because they would then belong to Sony. During this "process" Nintendo then decided to partner with Philips on the CD-i which failed.
Sony (not willing to waste all the money they invested for creating the "Nintendo Playstation" prototype) took the opportunity and made the Playstation brand.
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#3 Nintendo made Square move to Sony which made Playstation a success.
After the Virtual Boy disaster and Sony having its Playstation on it's way, Nintendo again decided to make another cartridge based system. The Ultra64 later known as Nintendo 64. This had a major advantage over CD based gaming systems like Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation, namely virtually no loading times.
But it also had more than one downside. The manufacturing of cartridges was way more expensive than "printing" CD's was which resulted in higher costs for the third party developers. And since its not only more expensive but more complicated and therefore takes more time, third party had to guess how well their games would sell.
What does that mean?
Lets say your game is super successful and you need more games because they are simply out of stock everywhere. Then you simply print new games and since cd manufacturing is easy you have the games in stores within days.
Having games on cartridges on the other hand was a risky thing. You either had not enough games in stores because you underestimated the demand for it or you wasted alot of money. How is this a problem you say?
Well when you don't have enough games for customers to buy then having the next batch in stores would take weeks thanks to the complicated process of ordering cartridges with the needed MB of storage and "installing" the roms etc. and this can result in people already losing interest in the game and buying other games instead. And if you ordered to many copies of your game the money you lose for unsold copies is dramatically higher than the money you lose for unsold CD's.
The other downsides of the cartridge were small space for the games compared to a CD, inferior sound quality again compared to CD, no video "support".
All this made Square jump ship to Sony's new Playstation.
And this is the reason Sony's Playstation became a success to begin with.
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#4 Nintendo killed Sega
We all (at least I hope so) remember the Dreamcast. Sega's last console. It had great games such as Shenmue and jet Set/Grind Radio etc. But let me talk about Sega's other consoles first. Sega had the Master System and the Genesis/Megadrive. Two awesome systems that were successful but had harsh competition namely the NES and SNES made by Nintendo.
Nintendo was the more dominant company at this time. To gain more marketshare Sega came up with stuff like the 32x and Sega CD but both were abandoned after a short time in favor of the upcoming Sega Saturn. This is were the problems started.
Later in 1994 the Sega Saturn was released which was a direct rival to the "Nintendo-made" Playstation that also released in 1994 more than it was a rival to the N64 that came out in 1996. Thanks to the abandoning of the 32x and Sega CD that hurt its fanbase Sega also had to fight a really agressive Sony that had a huge marketing campaign and studios like Square assisting in it's campaign for world domination.
The later released N64 was the next problem and in addition to the "complicated" hardware inside the Saturn that made it "hard" to develop games for, the console struggled and sold just 10 million units.
In 1998 to win back the gaming crowd Sega released the Dreamcast. A super powerful console that was ahead of its time in more than just 1 way. Online gaming anyone?
But strange company politics/decisions "lack of games" and gamers desperately awaiting the arrival of the next Playstation (Playstation by then was the non-plus-ultra in gaming) that also had a DVD player and this for a price some standalone DVD players had coupled with agressive marketing again, killed the Dreamcast.
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#5 Nintendo is the reason Microsoft joined the fight.
There is this guy called Joachim Kempin former VP of Windows Sales at Microsoft (for 20years). The guy left Microsoft in 2003 two years after the first Xbox was released. He told IGN in an interview that Microsoft just entered the console market "to stop Sony".
The story goes that Microsoft was on its way to form a partnership with Sony (like Sony did with Nintendo back during the SNES days). At least Microsoft wished so. Microsoft thought - since both companies are entertainment companies - that there could be a ton of things they could co-operate on. But Sony was not interested and refused to work with Microsoft.
Then when Sony's (Nintendo-made) Playstation became a success, Microsoft and Bill Gates feared that their stronghold of the PC market could be in danger. And that Sony's "living room computer" could threaten the Windows Market. This is when Microsoft devided to enter the fight.
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Of course all of this doesn't automatically make Nintendo responsible for what happend nor was Nintendo directly involved in most (especially the Sony) stuff but it shows that one single decision can lead to unexpected events.
Is someone else suddenly in the mood for the Butterfly Effect flick? No? hmmm...
Well in this sense.
Viva la gaming!
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What do you think?
Comment below please! (where else... silly me xD)
P.S.
And if you find any mistakes, gramatical errors or whatnot you can keep them (English is not my mother tongue)
It's 4 am now good night xD
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Thank you very much for reading my mess!
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