So you wrote three paragprahs, simply to argue that I was wrong to use the phrase "wouldn't allow" when "strongly coerced" or "effectively wouldn't allow" would've sufficed. The distinction you made is irrelevant, as it was then and will always continue to be.

No shortage of companies would've liked to develop for multiple consoles, they were not allowed to. No shortage of companies would've liked to expand their companies and use all of their considerable resources. Nintendo placed limits on how many games they could produce. Nintendo unambiguously abused market power. If you choose to disagree then its self-evident that you don't understand enough to partake in this thread.

So to recap:

Did Nintendo abuse market power? Yes they did.

Does it matter that other firms have abused market power? In regards to this topic, no it doesn't.

Does Nintendo's policies towards third parties continue to harm their relationships now? More than likely. 

Does it matter that Atari had inferior third party policies? Of course not, they are no longer in the market.

Were Nintendo arseholes back then? Yes they were.

No, Nintendo wasn't secretive. They were talking about their take on the market a long time in advance. They actually were more open than the competition. If the third parties didn't understand Nintendos strategy, it's for them to blame, not Nintendo.

@Picko: Abusing its position on the market wasn't the case, the same limitations Nintendo put to third parties, applied for Nintendo too.
Nintendo did force 2 years timed exclusivities for games and it's actually no different than the Sonys requirements on late ports having extra content on Sonys consoles.

Nintendo was an ass to 3rd parties with N64, with the "dream team" of developers, but because it backfired, they fixed the relations even during the N64 times (although, nobody still wanted to develope for N64 due to the high cost and low sales expectations). Due fixing the relations, Gamecube had pretty decent 3rd party support out of the gate, but due to moneyhatting from the competition and bad hardware sales, the support quickly dried out.

^
@bdbdbd

Yep, I wonder if Sony or MS would enforce such things today since third parties have decided to turn their systems into essentially a unified platform.

By the path they are taking I wouldn't be suprised if PSN users could chat or mingle with Live users. ^_^

I'm still waiting for the PS3 motion controls, so far Sony's managed to incorperate 3d model avatars, a weather and news channel.

At this point between Sony and MS it could probably look like whoever get's Motion Controls first can take some of the luster from Nintendo's fad.

Factor 5 has mentioned that they wanted to make a Wii game but couldn't because Nintendo wasn't willing/able to reveal specs on the Wii in a timely manner for game development to begin. Factor 5 felt 'forced' to goto PS3 and make Lair instead. And what a shame Wii didn't get Lair. Maybe it didn't hurt...

But point is, since Nintendo needed to keep details specifically the Wiimote secret until E3 and major games take 2-3 years to develop it certainly affected the quality of games 3rd parties sent to the system within the first 2 years.

However many of the other factors mentioned in this thread certainly played a major role too.

I can tell you don't like to "lose" an argument, Picko, which makes me wonder why you get into so many of them. Also, it's very childish to make overbearing statements like "you don't deserve to participate in this thread" when somebody counters your argument with a well-reasoned explanation. The entire point of debate is to provide reasonable arguments, not to belittle your "opponent" and hope they leave in disgust.

You completely ignored the point I made to harp over idealistic "what if" situations that don't take actual market mechanics into consideration. Nintendo did what every smart company does in that position: they minimized competition. If you don't like that, as I said, you'd better start criticizing every company that does it, because otherwise you're just being intentionally hateful towards Nintendo and forgiving of every other company that does the EXACT SAME THING as they do, if in slightly different practice.

Perhaps an example that hits close to home will make you realize how common "exclusionary policy" really is. When Microsoft first released Windows as a bundle with new PCs, they strong-armed hardware manufacturers to only package Windows with their new PCs; anybody caught shipping off a non-MS OS with any system was put on Microsoft's blacklist and boycotted by MS. They continued this practice until very recently, and it was less than a decade ago that this policy was finally put to rest in light of harsh federal prosecution.

Before you go condemning a practice, I suggest you do some actual research and find out how common it is. You end up looking like a hypocrite at best, and an ignorant debater at worst.

@dib8rman: EA have had the kind of thoughts even earlier, but i doubt it will happen.

@Gamerace: If i recall, Nintendo revealed the dev kits year prior to Wii release, which in Wiis case, would roughly equal 2 years prior to PS360 release, in terms of developement time. So, i doubt the F5 had really an issue there (except that they had jumped to PS3 before Wii "had the chance").

Nintendo was known in the past for really "strict" relationships with third-parties.
Its "attitude" caused many to "defect" to other consoles when they had the chance.

Coming into this generation of consoles, Nintendo had seen each iteration of its home consoles sell less than the one before (GC

Secrecy won nintendo next gen.... cause people heard MS and Sony as bragging about graphics and all and didn't hear nintendo.... however they played nintendo games, so in the minds of many new gamers, Nintendo = games leader, others = competition.

People tend to go for the leader

Most of the major third party publishers knew about the Wii before it was initially displayed at TGS 2005, and today (3 years after that event) some of these major third party publishers continue to doubt its long term prospects because it is not as technically advanced as the HD consoles.

In the 1990s there was a movement within the industry where most of the executive positions in major publishers and developers was being filled by former movie and music executives because they had more experience dealing with the large project budgets and marketing budgets that publishers were facing. As a result of that, few executives in companies are former game developers and/or have a particular interest in videogames; the exception of this is Nintendo which is the only major publisher in the world to have a CEO who was a game designer. Most of these executives have followed the same pattern to success of improving the graphics of a game, hyping the technical details, and using large marketing budgets to get the game into the consumer's hands. These executives do not (and can not) understand why the Wii is successful and no additional lead time would have made them more likely to support the system

@Happy Squirrel

I honestly didn't know that, I mean I knew of a few of them heck even Reggie, but I didn't pay any notice to that pattern. Thank you very much.