Late 90s, Sega of Japan probably had too much pride for that. Afterwards, if MS was still interested, perhaps Sammy's offer was more compelling overall.
I also don't think MS would have had much interest in all the other non-home-console-software businesses SEGA was involved in.
Could have been an organized crime/liability element too. The relationship they did end up having was fruitful enough.
> Okawa, who had loaned Sega $500 million in 1999, died on March 16, 2001. Shortly before his death, he forgave Sega's debts to him and returned his $695 million worth of Sega and CSK stock, helping the company survive the third-party transition.[188][189][190] He held failed talks with Microsoft about a sale or merger with their Xbox division.[191] According to former Microsoft executive Joachim Kempin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates decided against acquiring Sega because "he didn't think that Sega had enough muscle to eventually stop Sony."[192] A business alliance with Microsoft was announced where Sega develops 11 games for the new Xbox console.[193]
I am more curious about context here. Nintendo was (and is) a public company. Presumably Microsoft new what a reasonable bid would look like. This sounds like they weren't just laughing at the offer itself.
They could have been laughing at "your hardware sucks, why don't you do software and Microsoft will do the hardware?"
And when you look at the giant-ass (and noisy-ass) box and controllers that were the first Xbox, I'd argue that Nintendo weren't too far off laughing Microsoft out of the room. Of what little I know about Nintendo, there's no way they were sticking their name on that.
They were probably referring more to how powerful it was, not quality issues. And in that way they're still correct to this day, although Nintendo has figured out how to thrive with significantly less powerful hardware than Microsoft and Sony.
Nintendo chooses to use old components in their hardware, though. It's not like they don't have the industry contacts to source more powerful stuff if they want. They just want to have a positive profit margin on selling console hardware. They want hardware sales (and sales of first-party "killer app" software enabled by the hardware) — not third-party software license fees — to be their main revenue stream.
Each console or handheld Nintendo puts out follows a formula:
* Choose key components (CPU cores, screens on portables, etc.) that are two-to-five year-old, one-or-more generations-behind tech at design time, such that they're in wide manufacturing and easy to source as parts / cheap to license to build themselves.
* Add in novel in-house-developed IP cores/ASICs, which allow developers to build games that "do" a lot more than the key components would seem to allow.
* Wrap the whole thing in a novel interaction method that makes the console's hardware performance relative to its "console generation" kind of illegible (e.g. the Wiimote, the two screens of the DS, the portability of the Switch, etc.); which de-facto locks in games developed to target the hardware, making them much harder to port away; and which acts as a neato whizz-bang selling point in the form of enabling new "killer apps" (e.g. 3D first-person games with the N64 analog stick; Wii Sports with the Wiimote; Brain Training and other pre-smartphone "apps" with the DS stylus.)
Nintendo are at their best (i.e. most profitable) when they double down on this strategy, releasing a seemingly-new hardware "generation" that's really just the same existing hardware but with new/updated IP cores. The Gameboy Color is just an overclocked Gameboy with a better PPU. The Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube with an ARM coprocessor embedding wi-fi/bluetooth/SD card support. Etc.
The Switch is a departure from this strategy, in that the Tegra X1 wasn't actually all that old at the time of the Switch's release, and so likely bit into Nintendo's profit-margin on the Switch pretty heavily. I'm sure Nintendo would rather have used a slightly-older part. But there just wasn't anything like the Tegra X1 (in terms of GPU power per watt) until the Tegra X1 — no viable competitors, and no previous generation of the chip to lean on. And they were constrained by wanting to port Wii U games to the Switch, which demanded basically the X1's level of power.
In 2000, "your hardware sucks" didn't really hold water. The N64 was a cut-down SGI machine -- it had texture filtering, a Z-buffer, and perspective correct texturing. Things the PlayStation didn't have, because in the mid-90s the state of the art in Japanese 3D hardware was to modify sprite blitter chips to do 3D with affine transforms. Nintendo contracted with the American SGI to get SGI tech into the N64, a savvy move. The PlayStation had more polys on the screen at once, but they looked worse. And they had a CD-ROM, which let them undercut Nintendo on the price of games.
But the N64 didn't suck. Neither did the Gamecube, which was superior in capability to Sony's sixth-gen offering (though not Microsoft's).
My theory is residuals from that SGI contract is what allowed SGI Japan to stay alive. They later renamed themselves to to Silicon Studio. Now best known for developing Bravely Default.
Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for specifically this reason.
It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way.
Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.
I feel like the lack of CD-ROM dissuaded smaller-budget developers (eg: Moon, Vip Ribbon, etc.) and RPG makers like you mention, but I don't know if lacking a CD-ROM ultimately harmed the Nintendo 64's value proposition. The Resident Evil 2 port from Angel Studios was impressive reuse of the console's RSP, but I don't know if those sort of experiences were what Nintendo was going for or what it's audiences wanted anyway. I do think the PlayStation with it's CD-ROM drive did better with a broadening audience especially as the NES crowd grew older though.
Where by “content” they meant “pre-rendered cutscene videos and wholly-PCM music tracks.”
The idiomatic N64 approach to the same thing would have been to make the cutscenes with machinima; and to continue using short PCM audio samples for SFX and some instrument tracks in mostly-sequenced music, as was done in the latter half of the SNES's lifetime.
(What about images, e.g. textures? Even if you had created a huge world with a lot of different “stuff” in it, the textures wouldn’t have been a capacity problem either... because the N64 just didn’t have the memory to hold or render very large/detailed textures. In its architecture, it was detailed [for the time] meshes that were cheap to load/render, not detailed textures. That, combined with hardware support for Gouraud shading and a few other algorithmic effects, made “basic blocks of color with a few flourishes, over a well-made mesh” the only practical approach to 3D modelling for the N64. Which meant that a world with many unique 3D models could actually be quite cheap to store in ROM, as "basic block of color" textures were inherently reusable, and meshes themselves compress very well.)
Of course, this would never have worked for e.g. FF7, with its huge pre-rendered flat background scene textures; but imagine the FF7 we could have had on the N64. (The one that would look like the FF6 N64 demo, crossed with... Perfect Dark, maybe?)
N64 controllers had reliability issues due to games like Mario Party wearing out the sticks. Some of the DSes had hinges that would break from normal use.
I think the N64 Mario Party titles would have worn out literally any analog stick used to play them. The fault was more in the game-mechanic design, not realizing exactly what they were asking of the hardware, and not thinking through that the minigames involving rotating the stick would be replayed ad nauseam, thousands of times, for years.
There was the Virtual Boy. It was ugly, it was painful to play, and the overall experience was disappointing. I haven't heard of any reliability issues with it, but considering how massive a failure it was it might be that no one ever played one long enough to find out.
Ehh I guess it depends on how long until you expect a hardware issue. The directional pads on gameboys and DSs tend to fail, as well as the sticks on n64 and gamecube controllers
Well, the N64 controller's analog stick had a tendency to get really clunky after some time of use (it amassed some kind of "frictiony" feeling in its joint).
But then again, the my old console is still going strong. OTOH, my original Xbox refused to boot some years ago…
The wiki article seems like a reasonable defense to prevent corporate raiders from taking over and loading it up with debt while walking away with a fortune for basically crippling a once successful company. See KKR's takeover of TXU electric.
Nintendo isn't a perfect company by any means. But the are the only console/gaming company that keeps thinking outside the box.
Sony and MS: let's build a gaming PC and just have a different enclosure for it.
Nintendo: what if we try <any number of crazy and interesting ideas>.
Also: a few days ago a friend of mine got stuck with shitty mobile internet for e few days. The only gadget that by default assumed there's no internet and just kept on working with no problems was Nintendo Switch. Everything else (phones, consoles, readers etc.) just couldn't imagine a world without an internet connection and would suffer when connectivity was bad/intermittent.
The internet dependency angle is a good point to bring up, and incidentally it's why I've gotten into data hoarding or purchasing products that don't require the internet. Like you said, I can use my Switch or even my Kindle without any problem. I also play most games via emulation or buy them from GOG, which gives you completely DRM-free downloads, making it possible to just boot up a game like the old days.
I do have game pass, and the experience has been a constant reminder for why I hate a lot about the modern gaming world (with the exception of Switch, like you said). Often times when I just want to sit down and play a game, I instead have to jump through a series of hoops: download xbox update > update xbox > download game update > update game. For added fun, once in a while you even have to update your controller. Meanwhile I've never updated a switch game and always have a pleasantly plug and play experience.
Nintendo is also the only one of the bunch selling their hardware for profit. MS and Sony now have to maintain selling hardware at a loss to keep up the perception of advancement.
As I recall this has been true of at least MS and Sony (maybe even Nintendo?) for several console generations, though after a few years they've been able to bring costs down into profitability. Is that not expected for this generation?
As far as I know Nintendo hasn't ever sold hardware at a loss. That is not the way they do business. Of course there wont be a source from MS or Sony on the matter.
PS Nothing really wrong with a loss leader to draw customers. The problem with the console being a loss leader is MS and Sony have to perpetually build consoles that are loss leaders to show "advancement" that keeps customers. It also makes them reliant on subscriptions and software sales to maintain profitability. So, they are incentivized to lock customers in or they will lose profitability.
It's a double edged sword though. The gimmicks Nintendo comes up with can make their games not as good as they otherwise would have been. The Wii motion control for Zelda sword attacks and the touch screen levels in Super Mario 3D World come to mind.
Also all of Nintendo's mobile games require an internet connection to play.
Just playing devil's advocate. I am a huge Nintendo fan.
Microsoft presented a pretty fairly innovative vision of what a “game” console could be with the original Xbox One launch announcement. It was a complete debacle.
I’m also pretty impressed with XBox game pass- it has changed my relationship with gaming. I’ve been gaming with my XBox than my Switch because its reduced the friction of accessing high quality console games, and I’ve been trying more indie games because they are just there.
Not the sort of hardware innovation you are talking about, nor is Microsoft a first mover in the game subscription space, but still important I think.
Disclaimer- I’m a Microsoft employee, but not working on anything near gaming, and my opinions are my own.
Kinect okay, but looks like MS sort of just gave up on it. And now smartphones have it beat in terms of capabilities. So it could've become smaller, faster and more capable, but the window of opportunity passed.
Phones can detec motion, objects, faces and quite easily and surrisingly reliable considering how small their cameras are. Kinect could probably be great, but alas.
If you put your phone far enough away to capture your movements, I don't think you'd be able to play a game like fruit ninja. It's a different form factor.
They also always made money, didn't sell console at a loss. Even a "failing" n64 or GameCube was net positive for Nintendo from day 1, and every year until end of service. They weren't a company in need of help.
And if they joined, Microsoft is not the company that would have let them drop everything for the Wii (strange to say after the fact given kinect and stuff, but those were followers of a known success move), or again for the switch
> Nintendo: what if we try <any number of crazy and interesting ideas>.
This is called "lateral thinking with withered technology", an engineering principle articulated by Gunpei Yokoi. In Yokoi's day, the rationale for "withered technology" was that it was cheaper and much easier to second-source, meaning that a shortage from a single supplier wouldn't hold up the production run.
It wasn't until fairly recently (Wii and later) that Nintendo realized that participating in the red queen's race of ever-increasing console specs was going to get them trounced by megacorporations with much more cash to burn selling consoles at a loss, so they had to pivot to producing cheap hardware with unique value adds in order to get the console profitable fast.
Nintendo is a 132 year old company (111 at the time this happened), with a "war chest" of $10 billion. They've been successful for far longer than Microsoft have existed.
I don't know what Nintendo would get out of being acquired, and I'm not certain that Microsoft would be able to put together a convincing acquisition deal.
132 year old? So are some random family restaurants. How does $10bil of money matter either way? Microsofts market cal is north of $1T, while Nintendos is less than $100B. And finally the question is not what Nintendo would get out of it. The question is what their shareholders stand to gain.
$10 bil of money means Nintendo has all the money they need on hand to continue to develop for their markets or new markets so what impetus is there to be acquire or merge? Nintendo is not a very big company comparatively.
Ah, merging to get access to money, yes I suppose they don't need that. My uneducated guess is that the reason for a merger would rather be merging the xbox with the switch, and merging the game libraries too. Can't say I know whether that's a good idea.
Yeah that could happen but why? The architectures are different. What benefit is there? Many Japanese companies actually treat North American Market as a secondary thought, Nintendo in a sense is one of them.
It's not a misunderstanding its how companies work. If you make shareholders unhappy you simply risk them leaving. Thats why on average companies do things that make them happy. Oh, also the shareholders pick the board and the board does things for the company. You can see the relationship now?
I know how companies are governed, and it is of course an empirical fact that most large listed American companies are run to maximise stockholder value. But that does not mean that it is the purpose of all, or even most companies. People run companies with a variety of reasons, including things like having fun or making the world a better place. More importantly, companies have moral obligations not only to stock holders, but to the employees, the environment, and the communities they operate in.
Shareholders are known for optimizing for short-term liquidity or value gain, because even if some shareholders have a long-term view, shorter-term holders can buy in and force their views.
However, in many cases this is in direct conflict with much larger value growth that requires a longer investment term. Or in conflict with valuing greater long-term stability over a quick short-term gain.
No, what I'm saying is not up for debate is the fact that control gets shared when you take someone else's money. Its a known framework in which everyone operates.
Your "shareholders are known for" is simply a BS talking point. Every person who has a 401K is probably a shareholder somewhere. All those hundreds of millions of people value long term stability too. Nintendo is not a penny stock.
It's a different thing to say "I value long term thinking" and acting that way, and rewarding long term thinking. It may be that people are simply too stupid to see that the ship is being hacked up for fuel, and thus they put their faith in the captain doing so.
Yes, and especially not Nintendo, which was a family-owned company at the time. Imagine Papa Gino's going to a family pizzeria offering to buy them out and being told "no, and also fuck you".
Just to add on that... the original founder put a rule in the company that it must remain a family business, to the point that when they didn't had a heir, the guy adopted someone and gave him the family name, to keep the family going.
Only reason the company is not with a family CEO right now, is because the last family CEO personally gave the greenlight to the shift, because he genuinely believed Iwata (the person that would replace him) was more skilled than he was at managing the company... Yet seemly he still paid close attention to the company even after retiring.
Right now the children of the last CEO that theoretically own Nintendo biggest share block, but seemly nobody is sure of that, only information I found is that seemly one of them sold the shares to Nintendo itself (thus increasing the shares the other members had of Nintendo, percentage-wise).
Hiroshi Yamauchi took Nintendo public in 1962. He was the largest shareholder until his death in 2013. In 2008 he owned 10% of the shares, and as of 2020, all japanese individuals total share was under 5% [2].
Here's a financial statement from 2000 [1].
I can find no evidence Nintendo was a family-owned company at any point in recent history. Have a source showing even majority shareholder status by some family combined?
In a sentimental way, I guess so. But if Nintendo is a public company, they probably committed some kind of fiduciary wrong in not consulting their stockholders.
> I don't know what Nintendo would get out of being acquired,
Money. Old companies are merged, acquired, or spun-off all the time.
It's completely possible that Nintendo would prefer to spin off portions of their business which, while profitable, no longer align with their primary markets. Consider companies like General Electric; they started off producing equipment around electric power generation, installation, and use (lightbulbs and appliances), then they got into television, radio, computing, jet engines, health insurance, etc. Over the years they've spun off many of these divisions and today's GE looks nothing like OG GE.
You might want to check the "portions" of Nintendo business to realize why not. Even in core console gaming, they're notorious for not actually owning many studios, including some you would assume they do given how long they're worked together.
Notoriously, Nintendo didn't own Rare (who was a big studio for Nintendo bound games), didn't want to buy when they wanted to sold, and they ended up at Microsoft which is an acquisition that's very hard to spin as a success.
No kidding, Nintedo doesn't even own Intelligent Systems and those guys used to develop the Devkit tooling.
Get this: IS used to work from inside Nitendo's own factory.
Granted, while Nintendo does not own these companies they have strong control. Just last year Nintendo moved all their developers in Tokyo into a single tower.
> Over the years they've spun off many of these divisions and today's GE looks nothing like OG GE.
That's why today's GE is close to bankruptcy and easily threatened by corporate raiders. Arguably if they has stayed focused on their core competency of high quality cutting edge engineering instead of stupid financial engineering, they'd have stayed releva6ans powerful.
Japanese corporate operations are quite different, historically, than the US. For example, Japan has over 33,000 companies that are over 100 years old. Many are several hundred years old. The oldest is around 1300 years old, I think. Continuously operating.
Obviously most of these are not 'technology' companies, but the culture of corporate creation/destruction/merger is somewhat different.
One of the things that really sets them apart is Keiretsu[1]. Seemingly competing firms often work together for their common benefit in the name of Keiretsu. It is very "foreign" and strange from a US cultural standpoint, but it is also why so many Japanese companies last as long as they do.
It is important to note that the Keiretsu are split vertically, no two companies within a keiretsu should be direct competitors.
At least such was the case. A major counter example is Mitsui and Sumitomo. The Mitsui and Sumitomo banks merged, which triggered partial merges of other Keiretsu companies: except the real estate. Mitsui Real Estate and Sumitomo Real Estate still operate as competitors. Both developing new housing complexes and office towers.
Nintendo did sell a business that didn't align with their primary markets, Rare. Rare generated hits for Nintendo (like Donkey Kong Country), but iirc, Miyamoto never liked them. From the DKC wikipedia entry:
In the years following the game's release, rumours spread that Miyamoto disliked Donkey Kong Country and found it amateurish, provoking him to create the hand-drawn art style of Yoshi's Island. He was allegedly quoted as telling Electronic Games magazine in 1995 that "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good".
Rare was never owned by Nintendo - they were only ever a second party developer. Nintendo did provide them with significant financial resources and autonomy, however.
Another example of a company could be Game Freak and Creatures, the developers of Pokémon. Though it is now created with a joint-venture like company "The Pokémon Company" that is owned mostly by those three companies, with Nintendo owning 32%.
Interestingly enough, Nintendo studio acquisitions seem to be "rare" enough that they make news headlines, like the recent acquision of Next Level Games (makes of Luigi's Mansion 2 & 3), which will move from second-party to first-party:
Why not? Everyone counted Wii Sports as the best-selling game of all time despite being a pack-in (and even today it's #4 having only been outdone by Minecraft, GTAV and Tetris Mobile).
As others mentioned, not owned by Nintendo, but also Rare was sort of spent as a creative force by the time they were purchased in 2002.
They lost a lot of developers to Free Radical.
I'm not sure what Microsoft acquired with Rare because besides Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves the company has basically produced junk over the last eighteen years. They're not even in control of their main IP: Perfect Dark as Microsoft has parcelled that out to another studio for the reboot.
Rare did align with Nintendo’s core business - and was an exclusive Nintendo64 developer - but even Tim Stamper, co-founder of Rare, is apparently none-the-wiser...
> “One of the most interesting parts of the interview is Stamper's view on Rare's sale to Microsoft, and the question that seems to eternally be on everyone's lips: why didn't Nintendo snap up the studio beforehand? Nintendo owned almost half of the UK company, but for reasons unknown never tried to buy Rare outright, despite the fact that the Stampers were clearly on the lookout for buyers.
Stamper is at a loss as to why Nintendo didn't step in and open up its chequebook:
I've no idea why they didn't do that. I thought we were a good fit.” [1]
Couldn't edit after I saw the replies but thank you for reminding me Rare was always 2nd party. So not quite the same but Nintendo could have acquired them like Monolith Soft or Next Level Games
Nintendo would hopefully become higher quality under Microsoft, that's what they'd get out of it. Microsoft has shown they can culture a good developer ecosystem, Nintendo is awful for third party developers. Nintendo also struggles with new technology, their systems are always a step behind and they were critically late to having games on the app stores (the extreme success of Pokemon Go after a decade of thinking smartphones weren't worth it is an egg on the face of the Nintendo leadership).
They really just have a strong brand, that's about all Nintendo has going for it. Microsoft can steward the brand like they did for Minecraft and it wouldn't lose any value, we'd just get higher quality games and hardware.
Nintendo made so many brilliant games in the Mario franchise. Likewise with Zelda (and Metroid and there will be more if you look closely). Their consoles are typically robustly made. The controller-drift issue with Switch being a notable recent exception.
As for their systems being "behind", the xbox and playstation motion sensing controllers came _after_ the Nintendo Wii made them popular. The Switch came with a new idea of a console which is both a handheld and one connected to a television. The 3DS came with a lenticular 3D display. Unless you measure being ahead/behind in the sole axis of computational power, they are setting trends and taking gaming to new places.
They are a serious pain when it comes to how they hound fanmade products which might feature any of their IP, have a substandard system for online play, or a poor developer experience but being of sub-par quality is definitely more in microsoft's department than Nintendo's.
It's not good for a platform developer to be the only one making killer games. This is a lack of diversity that is a weakness. The titles you mention are the only good franchises on Switch, third party titles have not had the same success. Meanwhile, Microsoft has had huge third party success for their platform with Call of Duty and other publisher titles.
No doubt Nintendo has been innovative with the control schemes for their systems, but nothing has really stuck. The 3D display was a gimmick, they even released a second version without it because it was so gimmicky.
I'm not impressed with making a robust console in 2020 as a selling point. I have an iPhone, my expectations for robustness are higher now. The Switch is cheap and clunky and the screen is low res. Great, it can handle falls - welcome to 2005 electronics.
> It's not good for a platform developer to be the only one making killer games.
[Citation Needed]. Nintendo has clearly earned a reputation for first party games above any other manufacturer. Nothing really competes with their first party games like BotW, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and so on.
I can get Call of Duty on PC, Xbox, Playstation. I don't really see how that's a compelling case for the Microsoft platform. The latest Xbox seems better than the PS5 in my opinion on hardware and price, but the PS5 still seems like a better buy because they have exclusive games and the Xbox Series s/x does not.
I'd say among gamers it's pretty universally agreed that the Switch is not a competing console with PC/Xbox/Playstation. It's an "And" console. You don't get a switch as an alternative to one of the above consoles, you get it as a supplement to the others. Unless you're a casual gamer, in which case you probably just get the Switch.
I mean this isn't controversial within the games industry.
Having diverse sources of revenue matter to support themselves if their first party games take a stumble for whatever reason is critical. It's not like Nintendo hasn't had downturns in the past, e.g. the Wii U era.
Fully agreed. Nintendo has a very differentiated market of game offerings on their platforms, and that's the reason people buy it. They don't buy Switch for the (underpowered compared to competitors) hardware, or something else.
That's imo the biggest problem Xbox console is facing. Does it have good third party games? Plenty. Does it make sense to buy Xbox if you already own a PS4/PS5 or a gaming PC? Not really, since the overlap of third party games available on all of them is giant. The only game I know people care about that is Xbox exclusive is Halo series. I don't know a single person who owns a PS4/PS5+Xbox or even gaming PC+Xbox. I know tons of people owning a PC+PS4/PS5, and I know a ton of people who own either a PS4/PS5+Switch or gaming PC+Switch (or all 3 of them). And that's Nintendo's unique offering, being an incredible complement to other consoles, not a direct competitor, while also being a great product of its own that doesn't just function as an add-on.
Mind you, I am not saying that Nintendo shouldn't increase the number of third party games present on their platform, quite the opposite. The increase of third party games on Switch is a really welcome development. However, under no circumstances should they decrease the number of first party games, otherwise they would end up in a losing position.
I disagree with most of your points and your conclusion. Especially the "create a good developer ecosystem". You provided no examples either, which makes me think you have never been involved with Microsoft as a member of the game development community. My experience, was poor. To say the least.
I'll look for the article to link here (which I probably initially read on HN) but it was a blog post that described a developer's experience slogging through Nintendo docs and working with Nintendo and it being very slow and difficult. He went on to describe that he had none of these problems when dealing with Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Sony).
Do you have any examples of how Microsoft acted as a good steward for the Minecraft brand? I haven't seen anything positive come from their control. On the other hand, the brand hasn't regressed either, but you would surely expect something more than that from new owners.
Parity with the java edition would have been a good start, followed by actual support for more than just cosmetic modding.
> Nintendo is a 132 year old company (111 at the time this happened), with a "war chest" of $10 billion.
Now they are successful, after the huge hits of the Wii, DS and Switch. Even with that the company was in a lot of trouble during the Wii U period in 2014, with executives taking 50% pay cuts.
When this played out in 2000 it was during the N64 era, with GameCube being close to launch. While those were not failures per se, they were very, very far behind the PSOne and PS2 in terms of popularity.
Everything lagged far behind PS1&2. Many even predicted the death of PC gaming during the PS2 era, so great was its dominance. PS2 still outsold PS3 for a long time after the latter console was released. Nintendo survived that era, Sega did not (as a console manufacturer).
To me the interesting play would be to acquire Nintendo, move the Xbox division into the Nintendo division, and then spin that off into a new independent gaming company. Might be good for shareholder value in the end and put Microsoft in a better position to focus on their core enterprise cloud business while receiving fair value for its Xbox assets.
Nintendo was at its lowest point not long back with the WiiU. In 2000 they were looking at lacklustre performance with N64 and Gamecube. (and already fallen behind Sony)
As a huge fan of Nintendo I am glad this never happened. A few years later Nintendo released the Wii console which was revolutionary in allowing users to go beyond a physical joystick and incorporate movements in videogames.
Also companies acquired by microsoft don't usually have a happy ending(layoffs, product stagnation) see - skype, linkedin, yammer etc
Think one of the key advantages Japanese (and other East Asian) companies have over the US/EU counterparts is that they have very strong national sentiments. You saw this with Nissan debacle. Same with a couple of Korean companies. All the more reasons to believe that the Chinese market is simply a mirage for Western companies.
3. China has threatened military action against western allies, like Taiwan.
4. China has repeatedly violated promises that its made, like the Hong Kong handover.
5. China steals sensitive technology and manufacturing plans from foreign companies. It has mandated that foreign companies establish joint ventures with Chinese companies to do business in China, with unrestricted access to all internal company documents and systems of the foreign company.
The other comment in response covers it, mostly. To your second question: the first thing that comes to mind about China is “did it happen in modern China or Nazi Germany?”, not “oh noes whites are not in charge there!”
What? Are you suggesting that a lack of fealty to corporations is a result of the rise of feminism and marxism? Could you give more detail on these connections?
This guy is arguing that we've been straying from these (his) ideals, and corporations that don't stay domestic are part of a larger narrative of cultural decline.
I suspect a comment above you spelled it out: corporations value stock price too highly.
When stock price is all that matters, cutting costs wherever they think they can get away with it is the end result (over a long enough period, I'd assume this will always happen as execs cycle through)
As things (engineering, components, design, UX, etc) are cut, customers notice - and switch to brands that they percieve as having cut less. One example of this I'd assume is Apple.
That’s an interesting take, but I was making a different point. Corporations will always do what’s necessary to thrive, and what they need to thrive is largely a function of what society demands. If the corporations are taking down their nationalist trappings, then it’s because we no longer demand them. As far as my globalist politics is concerned, that’s good and well.
Eh, maybe in the past but not so much today. Sony is being effectively run from California, which means that their standards for appropriate game content are being decided according to San Francisco, and not Tokyo, values. The PS5 is doing worse than any previous Sony console in the Japanese market as a result.
It's actually been a long standing trend since the start of the PS3/Xbox360 generation. Iirc Sega had to merge with Sammy to weather the storm. Especially after losing so much money in the previous generation on the Dreamcast.
In that period, the Japanese videogame market shrunk a great deal, and many Japanese developers either went out of business, merged, or courted western publishers.
PS5 is really hard to buy in Japan, maybe same as all other countries. The rumor is that SIE reduced selling units for Japan and increased for US/EU. It seems reasonable because anyway Japanese non-core gamers won't buy Xbox Series S/X.
Actually, PS4 launch in Japan was delayed 3 month from US/EU so the PS5 situation is a bit improved, but still complained.
Another complain for PS5 (and SIE US) is that they changed ○/×/△/□ button meaning. Previously ○ was assigned to OK and × was Cancel that's opposite to foreign edition. Now on PS5, its assignment is same as foreign edition but it feels very strange use of symbol for almost all Japanese people. It should be PSX's initial design failure.
Eroge make up a large part of the market in Japan, like it or not -- and SCE in California are committed to eliminating toxic masculinity from their platform, even if it means leaving yen on the table.
I did some quick Google searches for the best-selling PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 games in Japan as those consoles were spearheaded by Tokyo. [1][2][3] I didn't see very many Eroge games. I do agree that they're a notable market, especially compared to the west, but they strike me as more niche than a cornerstone genre like action games.
> SCE in California are committed to eliminating toxic masculinity from their platform
I'd love to understand what you mean a little better here. I think I might have an impression from the themes of the God of War reboot, but I was curious if there's a Sony policy you might be able to reference and how that's influenced their first-party production. I'm having trouble understanding the overlap between anime-styled erotica and western depictions of masculinity.
From what I see on my Nintendo switch they are interested in different types of games. PC and consoles games seem to be more action. Nintendo has a ton of more old school types of games like JRPGs and platformers. There are also some creepy Japanese games I see, not sure what’s the game play is like. I can’t even describe what they are other than having flirty Anime type girls.
Is that necessarily a good thing though? Sure you'd want to co-opt a national identity, when it's suitable. But imagine if all the Silicon Valley era companies doubled down on their national identity at any point in their history...
I certainly don’t believe it’s good or bad. It’s more of a cultural phenomenon. US is also a cultural melting pot and they benefit a great deal from being open commercially as well.
I used to be of the opinion that Nintendo should just get out of the hardware market and just sell Mario/Zelda/etc... on XBox/PS. While I wouldn't mind if they did that, the switch has me completely convinced they should never get out of hardware.
I agree. The switch is really an amazing piece of hardware. I can be playing on my TV and just pull out the switch and continue playing if someone wants to watch something. Nintendo has been innovating gaming hardware for years. Microsoft would have pretty much said "make CPU go BRRR" and left it at.
The multiple Nintendo Labo kits are also an amazing show of the versatility of the Switch hardware. From hand-joystick, to motorcycle handles or a steering wheel with levers, turn-switches, pull-crank and pedal, a piano, fishing rod, etc. The controllers can be augmented to so many forms with just some cardboard and software. No need for specialized controllers like before.
Its ability to accommodate 2 players with a single control-set is also amazing.
They held the record for number of handheld consoles sold at various times and at one point of time, the GBA was the most sold gaming console ever. Usually the hardware also holds up well and has good resale value too. Their games are timeless and run only on their hardware (with few exceptions). Their hardware is sold at a profit.
I remember back around 2003 when a friend told me that the gamecube would/should be Nintendo's last piece of hardware, (I had recently purchased a used one).
They do seem to follow something of an every-other generation in terms of critical success for their consoles, at least starting with the N64:
+ N64
- GC
+ Wii
- WiiU
+ Switch
(I loved my gamecube, and it does have a few iconic games, but I don't kid myself how it compares to its neighbors in the timeline.)
Hopefully they break that cycle with whatever comes next!
The WiiU wasn't as big an innovation as the Wii, but I found the touchscreen controller in the WiiU to enable better participation of a less-dexterous little kid in family gameplay without them being such a drag on the adults' gameplay. Those types of households might have found it a more valuable upgrade than others.
The Switch is a different thing than what came before, though, because it represents the merging of their Gameboy and TV Console systems into a single machine. It's sort of miraculous that it worked out so well. Since the original Gameboy they've had the mobile gaming market cornered absolutely. Even with the rise of cell phones the "good" games aren't there. You can't play The Witcher 3 on your Samsung Galaxy Tablet even if ostensibly it's very similar, hardwarewise, to the Switch. Interestingly, Nvidia tried to make the Nvidia Shield as something like this, but failed and I think uses the same/similar GPU chips in the Switch now.
So the Switch is a merger of two branches
Gameboy Advance -> DS -> 3DS
N64 -> Gamecube -> Wii -> Wii U
And now these two markets have collapsed into the Nintendo Switch (which isn't a bad thing!)
I remembered that famous gaming journalist in Japan wrote that portable gaming console like DS is getting unpopular in the US so Nintendo designed Switch and Sony never released Vita2. Anyone have thoughts?
Yeah, the switch was the first and last console I bought since the PS2. The value proposition of a combined console and handheld, coupled with lots of nice games made it well worth it. On the other hand, I'm no longer interested in the Playstation series due to lack of backwards compatibility. I've still got lots of PS1 and PS2 games but no more PS2. If the PS6 will support them, I'd get it. Otherwise, not.
Imagine if this happened. Japanese, traditional, inovative, and somehow slow/reasonable paced company, who basically invented gaming as we know it, versus typical American quarter-to-quarter profit chasing MBA clueless zombies, who made no progress in gaming, invented nothing, but rather trying to buy competitors. Ridiculous
A lot of Nintendo's business decisions in 2019 and 2020 seem like the exact types of decisions empty suits make though, and their glassdoor reads very similarly to one of the big banks. Nintendo has, with the exception of the switch hardware and possibly labo, played the entire decade in a very conservative fashion. Microsoft and Sony aren't exactly innovative powerhouses either, but even they beat out Nintendo in innovation on the software side.
If you want real innovation in the industry though, you basically have to play indie games.
Evidently nothing came of the proposal, but I find it very difficult to believe that the executives of a Japanese company would "laugh" a proposal like this "out of the room". I imagine the scene played out with a lot of tea, carefully calibrated bows, and apologies about the timing of this excellent proposal not being auspicious.
patio11 probably could provide a more accurate projection of a sarariman reaction to the MS offer.
Kanye visited the Nintendo Booth during that E3 and was even able to spend a bit of time with Shigeru Miyamoto. He then requested a meeting with Reggie, and the two ended up meeting up at one of Kanye's offices in Calabasas, California.
I told him, ‘Kanye, you don’t want to work with us because we’re tough, we’re hard. All we do is push for the very best content. We would not be the type of partner you would want to work with.’
Thanks for clarifying that. I might have been wrong about their intention then, but mockery seemed plausible given they were also painting a very stereotypical picture of a business meeting.
Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers. Adopting a faux Japanese accent, particularly in print, is extremely cringeworthy.
Yes, my intent was not to mock a Japanese accent, but to adopt what seemed to me the most plausible spelling. In this particular case, the Japanese concept has far eclipsed the original English word, and the term was more or less a Japanese creation in the first place[0], so that's why I spelled it that way.
In other cases, the English spelling is still dominant, so using a back-transliterated katakana spelling (e.g. "Rabu Hoteru" instead of "Love Hotel") would be just weird.
> Native English speakers tend to just say "salaryman" when speaking to other English speakers.
We don't tend to use salaryman at all. There's white-collar, businessman etc. By contrast sarariman had been popularly coined in the 90s by the Japanese.
I believe the parent meant we would say 'salaryman' when speaking of the Japanese conception of the term. Which in my experience is true. It could be because 'sarariman', though a reasonable approximation of the Japanese pronunciation, does sound like a racist caricature, but I think it is equally likely it just feels awkward to the native-english-speaking tongue.
But it isn't. How about we stop assuming offense by default and instead we try to expect that other people are as reasonable as we are? For that matter, that one is in the guidelines here.
The English word "cookie" is derived from Dutch "koekie".
If some Dutch people bring back Oreos as souvenirs from the US and call them "cookies" instead of "koekjes", are they adopting a cringeworthy faux-American accent? Making fun of how English butchers their language? Or just calling them the way Americans do, without any further judgement?
Apparently you don't know about katakana, its a form of the Japanese alphabet that is specifically used for foreign words translated to Japanese. The pronunciation of these words sounds similar to their foreign counterparts. think sararimam == salaryman, hanba-gu == hamburger, terebijon == television and so on.
That's the correct romanization of the Japanese word サラリーマン, which, according to the Wikipedia article on it, is a loanword whose usage dates back to before the 1930s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman
Clearly, there should have been a young brash Nintendo VP tearing the printed proposal in half, then in quarters, then in one eighths, until all is left is pieces falling like cherry blossoms, all the while looking at the MS exec in the eyes and making a five-minute impromptu address on what it means to be Nintendo and why money-counting accountants will never understand it, until the MS exec runs out of the room crying, punched by the sheer verbal force of the righteous anger.
Yes, everything I learned about Japan, I learned from Japanese dramas, why do you ask?
“They just laughed their asses off,” Bachus said to Bloomberg. “Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
Yes, a piece of junk telling a store staple that it was a piece of junk would have that effect
I think many people over-focus on GPU and CPU capabilities and the raw horsepower of console hardware as the basis for determining console hardware superiority. As an avid gamer on PC and console, I've never thought of it that way, a PC will pretty much always be better on horsepower than a console. What consoles excel at is hardware that enhances the user experience or moves forward the technology focused on the act of gaming.
I am incredibly happy that Nintendo said "No." to Microsoft here, because the Nintendo Switch is the single greatest console device ever made. The way it handles docking/undocking, game switching, updates, sleep, the controller design of the removable joycons, it's an unprecedentedly good user experience in a way that's going to be incredibly difficult to top. I have been interminably sad that Sega stopped making consoles because prior to the Switch, the Dreamcast pushed the envelope in every possible way for what it meant to be a gaming console. The Xbox One did something great by improving controller design significantly, but realistically the majority of consoles released in the last few decades have not been pushing the envelope in the way that the format allows.
My only complaint is the switch has low resolution and many of the ports do not run that well. Skyrim and Witcher 3 are ports I didn’t buy because of the graphics. The Final Fantasy ports were decent but they were older games that had remakes in between. Dark Souls has decent reviews but I haven’t played the originals, remakes, or ports.
When a beefier switch comes along I’m jumping on it. The switch has been the funnest and most engaging gaming I’ve had in a decade.
Maybe because I have multiple systems, I haven't experienced this. I haven't really played many AAA ports because I would prefer to play them on PC or on the Xbox. But all of the indie games I've played as well as all the JRPGs, both Switch-exclusive and multi-system releases, have run flawlessly for me. Considering the hardware in a Switch is about on par with a mid-grade phone from a few years back, and the Switch OS seems to be a fork of Android, I am consistently surprised at how well everything just works flawlessly with it. My experience of trying to use phones as gaming devices have been pretty miserable and I don't keep any games installed on my phone these days, despite always having flagship devices.
If they ever release an upgraded set of Switch hardware that maintains compatibility with previous titles, I'd be really interested. But I have to be honest and say I'm not really dissatisfied with what it is today at all. Even the resolution is okay, considering the screen size. Hades is one recent release that's really great and works perfectly on the Switch, as an example.
Regardless of how this went, I see the mega-corp development over the last 10+ years as very concerning long-term.
Companies like FAAMG just grow and grow, to the point where they completely dominate markets in mono/oligopolies. This enables them to either buy up or destroy any kind of competition before it becomes noteworthy, cementing their positions for many decades. Not to speak of the political bargaining/lobbying power.
Regulators need to stop allowing corporations to expand into ever-more domains and become so dominant through shear measure of size and capital they can throw around.
Gaming is an interesting space here. Microsoft has become one of three major players. They are buying up big studios like Bethesda, and are pushing hard for a future where you don't own any games and can only rent them for playing on Windows, Xbox or via streaming.
Right now GamePass is an incredible deal, but things would look quite different if Xbox wasn't the underdog.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadI also don't think MS would have had much interest in all the other non-home-console-software businesses SEGA was involved in.
Could have been an organized crime/liability element too. The relationship they did end up having was fruitful enough.
EDIT - Well, looks like I was wrong.
> Okawa, who had loaned Sega $500 million in 1999, died on March 16, 2001. Shortly before his death, he forgave Sega's debts to him and returned his $695 million worth of Sega and CSK stock, helping the company survive the third-party transition.[188][189][190] He held failed talks with Microsoft about a sale or merger with their Xbox division.[191] According to former Microsoft executive Joachim Kempin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates decided against acquiring Sega because "he didn't think that Sega had enough muscle to eventually stop Sony."[192] A business alliance with Microsoft was announced where Sega develops 11 games for the new Xbox console.[193]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega#Dreamcast_and_continuing_...
And when you look at the giant-ass (and noisy-ass) box and controllers that were the first Xbox, I'd argue that Nintendo weren't too far off laughing Microsoft out of the room. Of what little I know about Nintendo, there's no way they were sticking their name on that.
Each console or handheld Nintendo puts out follows a formula:
* Choose key components (CPU cores, screens on portables, etc.) that are two-to-five year-old, one-or-more generations-behind tech at design time, such that they're in wide manufacturing and easy to source as parts / cheap to license to build themselves.
* Add in novel in-house-developed IP cores/ASICs, which allow developers to build games that "do" a lot more than the key components would seem to allow.
* Wrap the whole thing in a novel interaction method that makes the console's hardware performance relative to its "console generation" kind of illegible (e.g. the Wiimote, the two screens of the DS, the portability of the Switch, etc.); which de-facto locks in games developed to target the hardware, making them much harder to port away; and which acts as a neato whizz-bang selling point in the form of enabling new "killer apps" (e.g. 3D first-person games with the N64 analog stick; Wii Sports with the Wiimote; Brain Training and other pre-smartphone "apps" with the DS stylus.)
Nintendo are at their best (i.e. most profitable) when they double down on this strategy, releasing a seemingly-new hardware "generation" that's really just the same existing hardware but with new/updated IP cores. The Gameboy Color is just an overclocked Gameboy with a better PPU. The Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube with an ARM coprocessor embedding wi-fi/bluetooth/SD card support. Etc.
The Switch is a departure from this strategy, in that the Tegra X1 wasn't actually all that old at the time of the Switch's release, and so likely bit into Nintendo's profit-margin on the Switch pretty heavily. I'm sure Nintendo would rather have used a slightly-older part. But there just wasn't anything like the Tegra X1 (in terms of GPU power per watt) until the Tegra X1 — no viable competitors, and no previous generation of the chip to lean on. And they were constrained by wanting to port Wii U games to the Switch, which demanded basically the X1's level of power.
But the N64 didn't suck. Neither did the Gamecube, which was superior in capability to Sony's sixth-gen offering (though not Microsoft's).
Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.
The idiomatic N64 approach to the same thing would have been to make the cutscenes with machinima; and to continue using short PCM audio samples for SFX and some instrument tracks in mostly-sequenced music, as was done in the latter half of the SNES's lifetime.
(What about images, e.g. textures? Even if you had created a huge world with a lot of different “stuff” in it, the textures wouldn’t have been a capacity problem either... because the N64 just didn’t have the memory to hold or render very large/detailed textures. In its architecture, it was detailed [for the time] meshes that were cheap to load/render, not detailed textures. That, combined with hardware support for Gouraud shading and a few other algorithmic effects, made “basic blocks of color with a few flourishes, over a well-made mesh” the only practical approach to 3D modelling for the N64. Which meant that a world with many unique 3D models could actually be quite cheap to store in ROM, as "basic block of color" textures were inherently reusable, and meshes themselves compress very well.)
Of course, this would never have worked for e.g. FF7, with its huge pre-rendered flat background scene textures; but imagine the FF7 we could have had on the N64. (The one that would look like the FF6 N64 demo, crossed with... Perfect Dark, maybe?)
But then again, the my old console is still going strong. OTOH, my original Xbox refused to boot some years ago…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOJ_2007_No.30
Sony and MS: let's build a gaming PC and just have a different enclosure for it.
Nintendo: what if we try <any number of crazy and interesting ideas>.
Also: a few days ago a friend of mine got stuck with shitty mobile internet for e few days. The only gadget that by default assumed there's no internet and just kept on working with no problems was Nintendo Switch. Everything else (phones, consoles, readers etc.) just couldn't imagine a world without an internet connection and would suffer when connectivity was bad/intermittent.
I do have game pass, and the experience has been a constant reminder for why I hate a lot about the modern gaming world (with the exception of Switch, like you said). Often times when I just want to sit down and play a game, I instead have to jump through a series of hoops: download xbox update > update xbox > download game update > update game. For added fun, once in a while you even have to update your controller. Meanwhile I've never updated a switch game and always have a pleasantly plug and play experience.
https://www.cinemablend.com/games/1644500/how-much-money-nin...
https://metro.co.uk/2020/09/10/xbox-series-x-and-xbox-series...
PS Nothing really wrong with a loss leader to draw customers. The problem with the console being a loss leader is MS and Sony have to perpetually build consoles that are loss leaders to show "advancement" that keeps customers. It also makes them reliant on subscriptions and software sales to maintain profitability. So, they are incentivized to lock customers in or they will lose profitability.
Also all of Nintendo's mobile games require an internet connection to play.
Just playing devil's advocate. I am a huge Nintendo fan.
Hey, now, those are vital to the jumpless challenge run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahyd-tw2s0Q
I've just discovered Warioware Smooth Moves and man, was it fun! A great way to spend time with friends in these sad times.
I’m also pretty impressed with XBox game pass- it has changed my relationship with gaming. I’ve been gaming with my XBox than my Switch because its reduced the friction of accessing high quality console games, and I’ve been trying more indie games because they are just there.
Not the sort of hardware innovation you are talking about, nor is Microsoft a first mover in the game subscription space, but still important I think.
Disclaimer- I’m a Microsoft employee, but not working on anything near gaming, and my opinions are my own.
I haven't seen any phone stuff that's similar to the capabilities of kinect. VR is the closest thing in the current crop that I can see.
And if they joined, Microsoft is not the company that would have let them drop everything for the Wii (strange to say after the fact given kinect and stuff, but those were followers of a known success move), or again for the switch
This is called "lateral thinking with withered technology", an engineering principle articulated by Gunpei Yokoi. In Yokoi's day, the rationale for "withered technology" was that it was cheaper and much easier to second-source, meaning that a shortage from a single supplier wouldn't hold up the production run.
It wasn't until fairly recently (Wii and later) that Nintendo realized that participating in the red queen's race of ever-increasing console specs was going to get them trounced by megacorporations with much more cash to burn selling consoles at a loss, so they had to pivot to producing cheap hardware with unique value adds in order to get the console profitable fast.
"Nintendo does not talk about confidential discussions with other companies. In any event, nothing came of these discussions."
I don't know what Nintendo would get out of being acquired, and I'm not certain that Microsoft would be able to put together a convincing acquisition deal.
thankfully, not the whole world thinks like that.
However, in many cases this is in direct conflict with much larger value growth that requires a longer investment term. Or in conflict with valuing greater long-term stability over a quick short-term gain.
When you accept outside funding in exchange for shares, control gets shared. Honestly, do we really need to debate this?
Your "shareholders are known for" is simply a BS talking point. Every person who has a 401K is probably a shareholder somewhere. All those hundreds of millions of people value long term stability too. Nintendo is not a penny stock.
Only reason the company is not with a family CEO right now, is because the last family CEO personally gave the greenlight to the shift, because he genuinely believed Iwata (the person that would replace him) was more skilled than he was at managing the company... Yet seemly he still paid close attention to the company even after retiring.
Right now the children of the last CEO that theoretically own Nintendo biggest share block, but seemly nobody is sure of that, only information I found is that seemly one of them sold the shares to Nintendo itself (thus increasing the shares the other members had of Nintendo, percentage-wise).
Here's a financial statement from 2000 [1].
I can find no evidence Nintendo was a family-owned company at any point in recent history. Have a source showing even majority shareholder status by some family combined?
[1] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2000/001122e.pdf
[2] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/stock/information/index.htm...
Money. Old companies are merged, acquired, or spun-off all the time.
It's completely possible that Nintendo would prefer to spin off portions of their business which, while profitable, no longer align with their primary markets. Consider companies like General Electric; they started off producing equipment around electric power generation, installation, and use (lightbulbs and appliances), then they got into television, radio, computing, jet engines, health insurance, etc. Over the years they've spun off many of these divisions and today's GE looks nothing like OG GE.
Notoriously, Nintendo didn't own Rare (who was a big studio for Nintendo bound games), didn't want to buy when they wanted to sold, and they ended up at Microsoft which is an acquisition that's very hard to spin as a success.
Get this: IS used to work from inside Nitendo's own factory.
Granted, while Nintendo does not own these companies they have strong control. Just last year Nintendo moved all their developers in Tokyo into a single tower.
That's why today's GE is close to bankruptcy and easily threatened by corporate raiders. Arguably if they has stayed focused on their core competency of high quality cutting edge engineering instead of stupid financial engineering, they'd have stayed releva6ans powerful.
Obviously most of these are not 'technology' companies, but the culture of corporate creation/destruction/merger is somewhat different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
At least such was the case. A major counter example is Mitsui and Sumitomo. The Mitsui and Sumitomo banks merged, which triggered partial merges of other Keiretsu companies: except the real estate. Mitsui Real Estate and Sumitomo Real Estate still operate as competitors. Both developing new housing complexes and office towers.
In the years following the game's release, rumours spread that Miyamoto disliked Donkey Kong Country and found it amateurish, provoking him to create the hand-drawn art style of Yoshi's Island. He was allegedly quoted as telling Electronic Games magazine in 1995 that "Donkey Kong Country proves that players will put up with mediocre gameplay as long as the art is good".
Again according to wikipedia, DKC was one of the top selling SNES games, only Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars are higher on the list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Super_Nin....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_(company)
https://micky.com.au/nintendo-acquires-bc-video-game-develop...
They lost a lot of developers to Free Radical.
I'm not sure what Microsoft acquired with Rare because besides Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves the company has basically produced junk over the last eighteen years. They're not even in control of their main IP: Perfect Dark as Microsoft has parcelled that out to another studio for the reboot.
> “One of the most interesting parts of the interview is Stamper's view on Rare's sale to Microsoft, and the question that seems to eternally be on everyone's lips: why didn't Nintendo snap up the studio beforehand? Nintendo owned almost half of the UK company, but for reasons unknown never tried to buy Rare outright, despite the fact that the Stampers were clearly on the lookout for buyers.
Stamper is at a loss as to why Nintendo didn't step in and open up its chequebook:
I've no idea why they didn't do that. I thought we were a good fit.” [1]
[1] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/08/rare_co-founder_ha...
They really just have a strong brand, that's about all Nintendo has going for it. Microsoft can steward the brand like they did for Minecraft and it wouldn't lose any value, we'd just get higher quality games and hardware.
As for their systems being "behind", the xbox and playstation motion sensing controllers came _after_ the Nintendo Wii made them popular. The Switch came with a new idea of a console which is both a handheld and one connected to a television. The 3DS came with a lenticular 3D display. Unless you measure being ahead/behind in the sole axis of computational power, they are setting trends and taking gaming to new places.
They are a serious pain when it comes to how they hound fanmade products which might feature any of their IP, have a substandard system for online play, or a poor developer experience but being of sub-par quality is definitely more in microsoft's department than Nintendo's.
No doubt Nintendo has been innovative with the control schemes for their systems, but nothing has really stuck. The 3D display was a gimmick, they even released a second version without it because it was so gimmicky.
I'm not impressed with making a robust console in 2020 as a selling point. I have an iPhone, my expectations for robustness are higher now. The Switch is cheap and clunky and the screen is low res. Great, it can handle falls - welcome to 2005 electronics.
[Citation Needed]. Nintendo has clearly earned a reputation for first party games above any other manufacturer. Nothing really competes with their first party games like BotW, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and so on.
I can get Call of Duty on PC, Xbox, Playstation. I don't really see how that's a compelling case for the Microsoft platform. The latest Xbox seems better than the PS5 in my opinion on hardware and price, but the PS5 still seems like a better buy because they have exclusive games and the Xbox Series s/x does not.
I'd say among gamers it's pretty universally agreed that the Switch is not a competing console with PC/Xbox/Playstation. It's an "And" console. You don't get a switch as an alternative to one of the above consoles, you get it as a supplement to the others. Unless you're a casual gamer, in which case you probably just get the Switch.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nintendo-reliance-on-first-p...
I mean this isn't controversial within the games industry. Having diverse sources of revenue matter to support themselves if their first party games take a stumble for whatever reason is critical. It's not like Nintendo hasn't had downturns in the past, e.g. the Wii U era.
That's imo the biggest problem Xbox console is facing. Does it have good third party games? Plenty. Does it make sense to buy Xbox if you already own a PS4/PS5 or a gaming PC? Not really, since the overlap of third party games available on all of them is giant. The only game I know people care about that is Xbox exclusive is Halo series. I don't know a single person who owns a PS4/PS5+Xbox or even gaming PC+Xbox. I know tons of people owning a PC+PS4/PS5, and I know a ton of people who own either a PS4/PS5+Switch or gaming PC+Switch (or all 3 of them). And that's Nintendo's unique offering, being an incredible complement to other consoles, not a direct competitor, while also being a great product of its own that doesn't just function as an add-on.
Mind you, I am not saying that Nintendo shouldn't increase the number of third party games present on their platform, quite the opposite. The increase of third party games on Switch is a really welcome development. However, under no circumstances should they decrease the number of first party games, otherwise they would end up in a losing position.
Parity with the java edition would have been a good start, followed by actual support for more than just cosmetic modding.
Now they are successful, after the huge hits of the Wii, DS and Switch. Even with that the company was in a lot of trouble during the Wii U period in 2014, with executives taking 50% pay cuts.
When this played out in 2000 it was during the N64 era, with GameCube being close to launch. While those were not failures per se, they were very, very far behind the PSOne and PS2 in terms of popularity.
I understand why Nintendo thinks they are in a strong position. They can sell low quality games and the people don't know better.
Something to be admired about their corporate culture over there
Nintendo was at its lowest point not long back with the WiiU. In 2000 they were looking at lacklustre performance with N64 and Gamecube. (and already fallen behind Sony)
Also companies acquired by microsoft don't usually have a happy ending(layoffs, product stagnation) see - skype, linkedin, yammer etc
2. China is bent on expanding territory. It has border disputes with nearly all of its neighbors. https://asianews.press/2020/06/30/china-has-border-dispute-l...
3. China has threatened military action against western allies, like Taiwan.
4. China has repeatedly violated promises that its made, like the Hong Kong handover.
5. China steals sensitive technology and manufacturing plans from foreign companies. It has mandated that foreign companies establish joint ventures with Chinese companies to do business in China, with unrestricted access to all internal company documents and systems of the foreign company.
Fascists value:
- corporatism
- nationalism
- "traditional values"
- masculinity / machismo
This guy is arguing that we've been straying from these (his) ideals, and corporations that don't stay domestic are part of a larger narrative of cultural decline.
When stock price is all that matters, cutting costs wherever they think they can get away with it is the end result (over a long enough period, I'd assume this will always happen as execs cycle through)
As things (engineering, components, design, UX, etc) are cut, customers notice - and switch to brands that they percieve as having cut less. One example of this I'd assume is Apple.
In that period, the Japanese videogame market shrunk a great deal, and many Japanese developers either went out of business, merged, or courted western publishers.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/222192/Japans_console_ga...
So I wouldn't have thought a Microsoft takeover attempt would have truly been laughed out the room at that time.
But Nintendo are a very unique company. Much like Ferrari in Italy.
Very few brands in the world like it. They would have found willing backers that cherished their independence.
Actually, PS4 launch in Japan was delayed 3 month from US/EU so the PS5 situation is a bit improved, but still complained.
Another complain for PS5 (and SIE US) is that they changed ○/×/△/□ button meaning. Previously ○ was assigned to OK and × was Cancel that's opposite to foreign edition. Now on PS5, its assignment is same as foreign edition but it feels very strange use of symbol for almost all Japanese people. It should be PSX's initial design failure.
> SCE in California are committed to eliminating toxic masculinity from their platform
I'd love to understand what you mean a little better here. I think I might have an impression from the themes of the God of War reboot, but I was curious if there's a Sony policy you might be able to reference and how that's influenced their first-party production. I'm having trouble understanding the overlap between anime-styled erotica and western depictions of masculinity.
EDIT: updated line spacing for readability
[1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/flashback-sales-top-seeling-p...
[2] http://garaph.info/gamesearch.php?titleenglish=&stte=0&title...
[3] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/media-create-sales-04-06-04-1...
I’m curious what you believe would have happened if Silicon Valley companies doubled down on a US identity.
Its ability to accommodate 2 players with a single control-set is also amazing.
Why did you feel they shouldn't sell hardware?
They do seem to follow something of an every-other generation in terms of critical success for their consoles, at least starting with the N64:
(I loved my gamecube, and it does have a few iconic games, but I don't kid myself how it compares to its neighbors in the timeline.)Hopefully they break that cycle with whatever comes next!
So the Switch is a merger of two branches Gameboy Advance -> DS -> 3DS N64 -> Gamecube -> Wii -> Wii U
And now these two markets have collapsed into the Nintendo Switch (which isn't a bad thing!)
Imagine the company that released Windows ME trying to convince you of their competency.
If you want real innovation in the industry though, you basically have to play indie games.
patio11 probably could provide a more accurate projection of a sarariman reaction to the MS offer.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Nintendo+of+USA/@47.651052...
Kanye visited the Nintendo Booth during that E3 and was even able to spend a bit of time with Shigeru Miyamoto. He then requested a meeting with Reggie, and the two ended up meeting up at one of Kanye's offices in Calabasas, California.
I told him, ‘Kanye, you don’t want to work with us because we’re tough, we’re hard. All we do is push for the very best content. We would not be the type of partner you would want to work with.’
"Well, Kayne, it's because we only want the best. We push very hard for that."
"And…"
"You're not that."
As for stereotyping… maybe! But isn't "laughing a proposal out of a room" a stereotype as well?
How about we stop assuming mockery just because it might seem plausible and instead we lean toward "no offense intended" by default?
In other cases, the English spelling is still dominant, so using a back-transliterated katakana spelling (e.g. "Rabu Hoteru" instead of "Love Hotel") would be just weird.
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=salary+man%2Cs...
We don't tend to use salaryman at all. There's white-collar, businessman etc. By contrast sarariman had been popularly coined in the 90s by the Japanese.
But it isn't. How about we stop assuming offense by default and instead we try to expect that other people are as reasonable as we are? For that matter, that one is in the guidelines here.
If some Dutch people bring back Oreos as souvenirs from the US and call them "cookies" instead of "koekjes", are they adopting a cringeworthy faux-American accent? Making fun of how English butchers their language? Or just calling them the way Americans do, without any further judgement?
katakana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
Yes, everything I learned about Japan, I learned from Japanese dramas, why do you ask?
Yes, a piece of junk telling a store staple that it was a piece of junk would have that effect
I am incredibly happy that Nintendo said "No." to Microsoft here, because the Nintendo Switch is the single greatest console device ever made. The way it handles docking/undocking, game switching, updates, sleep, the controller design of the removable joycons, it's an unprecedentedly good user experience in a way that's going to be incredibly difficult to top. I have been interminably sad that Sega stopped making consoles because prior to the Switch, the Dreamcast pushed the envelope in every possible way for what it meant to be a gaming console. The Xbox One did something great by improving controller design significantly, but realistically the majority of consoles released in the last few decades have not been pushing the envelope in the way that the format allows.
When a beefier switch comes along I’m jumping on it. The switch has been the funnest and most engaging gaming I’ve had in a decade.
If they ever release an upgraded set of Switch hardware that maintains compatibility with previous titles, I'd be really interested. But I have to be honest and say I'm not really dissatisfied with what it is today at all. Even the resolution is okay, considering the screen size. Hades is one recent release that's really great and works perfectly on the Switch, as an example.
Companies like FAAMG just grow and grow, to the point where they completely dominate markets in mono/oligopolies. This enables them to either buy up or destroy any kind of competition before it becomes noteworthy, cementing their positions for many decades. Not to speak of the political bargaining/lobbying power.
Regulators need to stop allowing corporations to expand into ever-more domains and become so dominant through shear measure of size and capital they can throw around.
Gaming is an interesting space here. Microsoft has become one of three major players. They are buying up big studios like Bethesda, and are pushing hard for a future where you don't own any games and can only rent them for playing on Windows, Xbox or via streaming.
Right now GamePass is an incredible deal, but things would look quite different if Xbox wasn't the underdog.