I suppose each company has their own (mostly) hidden secrets.

This looks like another john lucas crazy thread.

Agree with some points, but it's clear that you simply don't understand about bussiness. Are you really that naive to believe what you wrote?

Nintendo is not evil for developing cheap games and taking away a lot of profits (well in the past) and Sony/MS good companies by spending every dollar in new videogames.

Those three companies wants to invest less and generate more profit. You are just fooling yourself believing anything else. Just because Nintendo was capable of doing that, while S/M are not, doesn't mean they are good. In fact, it just proofs how incompetent the later two are. Bussiness is not about pleasing fans and red numbers. It's about selling and keep a "happy" userbase interest in buying your next product.

Think about it for a moment.

Gaming is about passion bro. Sony and Microsoft are for the gamers... well at least the real gamers.

Of what he said that was the truth, I don't think any of it was "hidden" or a "secret."

Welp I was wrong. Evil Nintendo should die!

That's your interpretation, and it's wrong. I as really asking (although I was a bit more inclined to say no because if it was just for Rare it could be considered not as being Nintendo itself).

Anyway, this is far from being the big picture. Nintendo came later on the shift to vocal music on its major franchises.

Effort can be translated into number of man-hours work. And that's objective.

Yes, I have no way of knowing that but I have several ways to estimate it. Let me give you one example: TrackMania. Nadeo hired 12 bands to create exclusive music tracks to TrackMania Sunrise. The result was: 13 tracks, most of them with vocal parts. Then they made Nations and United, each one with a brand new soundtrack this time instrumental-only: Nations got 4 tracks and United got 8. Do you know who made them? One guy. That's all it needs to create instrumental-only music. Not 12 bands, 1 guy. Of course I don't know if the previous 12 bands spent only a few ours and this new guy spent thousands of hours creating those musics, but I'm confident this was not the case.

Let me give you another example, this time out of videogaming: Rurouni Kenshin. Aside from the openings and endings, do you know how many music tracks the anime has? 92. Do you know who made them? One guy. Again, I don't know whether he spent his entire life doing that. But I'm pretty sure it took a lot less than that. I'm a fan of instrumental-only music and I know a lot more cases than these two. And, by my experience, I'm inclined to say that this kind of music usually takes a lot less resources to be made than vocal music. Of course I know some other cases where such music demands an entire orchestra. Here the effort is similar, since it takes more people but less time (again, this is only considering my knowledge as a fan of instrumental music). But these cases are not common in videogaming.

Now let's look at Sonic and Mario. Sonic Adventure 1 has: 7 vocal music tracks and around 30 instrumental music tracks. Mario 64 has: 0 vocal music tracks and around 20 instrumental. Now I have 2 questions for you. First, why didn't Sonic Team create 30 vocal and 7 instrumental, why was it the other way around? Second, what do you estimate to have been the most demanding soundtrack to create: the one from Sonic Adventure or the one from Mario 64? I guess you already know what my conclusions are.

To conclude, what is my point (on the OP) with all of this? Simple, just to deliver some indicators about the effort Nintendo puts into its games (compared to the competition). Then people decide what conclusions can be taken. Some may easily perceive that vocal music demands a different kind of commitment while others may twist any logic that that exposes Nintendo's fragilities until the end of the world.

The OP doesn't try to explain business. It only suggests a way on which the market could behave. Using your own logic, I could say that you don't seem to understand the market. But I will not do that, once it would be unfair.

However, one thing that I think it's worth for you to undestand is that big revenues hide big inefficiencies. Companies don't need to suck huge amounts of money from their clients to make a profit. They just need to be efficient both internally (for example, don't having workers earning a lot by producing so little) and externally (for example, add "cost" to their products only on what will be valued by the clients). Sony has learned that and is now making a profit despite having a non-expensive powerful console with everything that gamers want. PS3's Cell was a huge inefficiency, giving millions for temporary exclusives is another one and Kinect on all XOnes is yet another. Nintendo doesn't seem to have significant external inefficiencies but I speculate that they have huge internal ones, once they are not making a profit despite what they deliver to be (technically) poor regarding what they charge.

I will never be heartbroken with the exit of any company that insistently makes stupid moves or that jeopardises the long-term with its greediness. Unlike you, I don't have the power to see the future, so I don't know what companies will come and go. But one thing I know for sure: it is possible to stay on this market clean from stupid moves and greediness and still make a profit. And, quite frankly, those are the companies that deserve to stay.

Going to have to call you out again.  For someone that supposedly knows all this historical data on Nintendo, you failed to know that Nintendo owned Rare during that period?

It depends on how each one of us define innovation. And, honestly, you must have a peculiar way, since you consider improvement of multiplayer capabilities but disregard improvement of core capabilities.

For me, anything can be innovation: from PS3's Cell to Xbox's Live, from Wii motion to Sony's Blu-ray.

You talk like powerful consoles was just a whim from Sony and Microsoft. It's not. Power is what allows anything else. Improving power is opening new doors to innovation.

You also talk like Nintendo games were more fan to play. Again, this is false. It depends on each gamer's tastes and preferences. For example, taking only gameplay into account, I find MotorStorm more fun than Excite Truck. In this case, Sony's IP is better in everthing (graphics, gameplay, content, etc.). But this is only my opinion. You love your DS and 3DS. That's fine. Other people love their PS3 and PS Vita. It would be arrogant of you to think that those people only care about graphics.

Not true. I could say then that Nintendo's motion tech has copied Sony's EyeToy Cameo. I could also say that the 4-player-gameplay on Super Mario Bros was a copy from LittleBigPlanet. Etc.

I believe no one here has ever bashed on Nintendo because they act differently but because they don't act in a good way. Difference on itself has no problem at all.

And one could say opposite thing you are claiming: without Nintendo the market would have flourished much faster and we could have nowadays a lot more devs and games on a significantly larger market.