torok said:
N64 limiting the devs for their own good? Cartridges were more expensive to manufacture, they were making the lose money. The only thing N64 did was block them to do the pre-rendered cutscenes the public wanted. Nintendo politics just had one objective: guarantee that Nintendo 1st party games had a unfair advantage and guarantee that Nintendo controlled everything around 3rd party games. So, when the first guy promissed something better (Sony), 3rd parties jumped ship praying for better days. |
Yes it did - one of the quality control methods was to limit the number of games a single publisher could release on Nintendo's console each year (including Nintendo themselves). This was made in order for the publishers to make games that could sell instead of churning out the crap that caused Atari to crash. If you think the broken NES games were bad, the broken Atari games were horrible.
When you go back to mid 80's, the console race is much more even than it looks like when looking at the totals 3 decades later, as it wasn't until 1989 or so the NES sales exploded. It's not that as a publisher you didn't have any options - you had Sega Master System, Atari 5200 and 7800, Commodore 64 to name a few that had the potential to compete NES (some did beat NES in different regions) - and still the publishers chose Nintendo, which is strange as nobody believed consoles having a future of any kind.
It isn't different today - the console manufacturers press the discs and send the bill to publishers. If you pay X amount of license fees per copy anyway, I don't think the medium matters. However, the big plus was, that back then you used Nintendo's distribution channel, meaning that if Nintendo made you a million copies of a niche title, they were going to ship the million copies to stores. One of the problems Nintendo had with cartriges was during the NES days that they weren't able to produce them enough.
There wasn't such thing as "pre-rendered cutscene" in the terminology of 90's, they were FMV's, full-motion videos. And even then, the common perception was that the videos should be done with the engine. N64 was designed the same way as previous consoles - to run everything from the program code. Playstation had very different take, as it was designed to stream data directly from the disc. The cartrige ended up hurting Nintendo badly, as PS games were roughly half the price of N64 games at retail - not to mention the not-so-stellar Playstation games in the bargain bin that made pirating them having no point, as the empty disc you would burn the game to was more expensive than the game bought new.
The smacktalk of Nintendo's business comes mostly from the guys that either bet the wrong horse back when NES was popular or guys who weren't able to release the amount of games they had wanted due to Nintendo's quality control policy.
I think we both like the small guys, right? If console manufacturers had the policy of one publisher being able to release 5 games a year on a single console, who would suffer and who would benefit? The big budget games would be made anyway, so what would be made less is the cheap shit made just to fill store shelves - that would benefit all the smaller publishers that could have more sales for their games due to smaller competition of the shelf space.
IF the third parties are doing so much better with the "Sony practices", why are they going belly-up? Why aren't there as much developers there were during the SNES days? As there should be more of them if Sonys business practices are better for the 3rd parties.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
