[HN Gopher] Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death
___________________________________________________________________
Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-04-16 12:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| xattt wrote:
| There's an interesting shift in perspective that's been happening
| around Nintendo over the last decade.
|
| While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese
| company with quirky qualities, it's becoming more and more
| apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to
| protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny
| from fun.
|
| Things I've purchased from them in the last little while are
| probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.
| ericzawo wrote:
| Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their
| punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping
| game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the
| NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.
| decae wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk
| adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution.
| It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese
| companies.
|
| Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue
| maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping
| control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Every time Nintendo tries to set foot in the competitive
| scene or permit tournaments, this happens.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_
| o...
|
| I don't blame them for trying to keep out. It would seem
| that professional Smash players are not to be assumed as
| stable people.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers.
| Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They
| didn't have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a
| pro controller. At least for that one product there was a
| hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP
| as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun
|
| I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern
| gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic
| microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying
| to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious
| offenders in this area
|
| In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash
| directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is
| still releasing games you can just own?
|
| Please help me understand
| xattt wrote:
| Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number
| of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc.
|
| In the last decade, they've been aggressively pursuing
| emulator hobbyists and "making deals they couldn't refuse"
| (Yuzu).
|
| Recently, they started offering a "soundtrack" app as part of
| the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music
| from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative
| move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to
| delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing
| Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright).
|
| Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being _sold_ rather than
| included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the
| Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app?
|
| There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you
| say "gotcha", but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be
| adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that
| gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I don't know, I actually do _somewhat_ get it.
|
| If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do
| not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve
| Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free
| meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was
| not okay.
|
| Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully
| firsthand how giving customers free things almost always
| backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers.
| Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now
| that the Welcome Tour be free; _even though_ they would not
| be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome
| Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less
| demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards.
|
| On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious
| about their intellectual property in ways other companies
| do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation,
| and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes _four
| times_ as much money per year from mobile gaming than
| Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty
| of fallback cash from the rest of their respective
| companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no
| fallback option.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no
| fallback option
|
| Nintendo reportedly has $15 billion in cash, while
| PlayStation and Xbox are both marginal
|
| Framing Nintendo as "the small one" is funny :)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Sony has $20 billion of cash on hand as of December 2024,
| Microsoft has $70 billion of cash on hand, and Apple has
| $53 billion of cash on hand. If something goes south, the
| rest of the company can keep them afloat (and has in
| multiple cases, see Xbox 360 red ring); Nintendo has no
| such luxury.
|
| Sony receives 38% of their revenue from PlayStation.
| Microsoft receives 8% of their revenue from Xbox. Apple's
| amount is four times larger than Nintendo, but
| insignificant to Apple. Nintendo, meanwhile, >90% at
| least comes from gaming-related activity (movie and toy
| licensing might be the exception).
|
| Yes, Nintendo is the smallest, the most dependent on the
| industry, and it's not even close.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Sony has $20 billion of cash on hand as of December
| 2024
|
| Sony is $28 Billion in debt as of 2024 too
|
| > Microsoft has $70 billion of cash on hand
|
| Microsoft has $62 billion in debt
|
| > Apple has $53 billion of cash on hand
|
| I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader
|
| How much debt is Nintendo in? (Hint- It's insignificant)
|
| Now you can do the usual capitalist moron MBA shit and
| moan about how debt is good actually, but frankly
|
| Nintendo is Japans most successful company and Sony isn't
| even in the top 300
|
| Nintendo is _real_ , Sony is a paper tiger
| kod wrote:
| > Nintendo is Japans most successful company and Sony
| isn't even in the top 300
|
| by what bizarro metric is Nintendo more successful than
| Toyota? debt to equity ratio is all you care about?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Successful may have been the wrong term, but Nintendo is
| (or was last year at least) Japan's richest company.
|
| This is not a trivial thing
|
| https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/713322
|
| > debt to equity ratio is all you care about?
|
| All I care about? No, but you cannot so easily dismiss it
| either
|
| Companies, even huge ones, that are highly leveraged are
| in a precarious spot. A competitor could simply buy them,
| a bad product launch could lead to investors pulling out
| and the company being parted out and sold... Many
| industries are littered with the remains of huge,
| "untouchable" companies that were vulnerable because of
| their debt load
|
| Companies having savings and low debt load is good for
| the company and its employees actually
|
| It is only bad if you are a hyper capitalist investor
| idiot who doesn't care about the long term success of the
| company and just want to extract as much wealth as you
| possibly can for yourself before leaving it to crumble
| xattt wrote:
| > I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers
| free things almost always backfires and just creates
| extremely demanding customers
|
| I appreciate that. Running a small business is no small
| feat, and takes every bit of blood, sweat and tears to
| make it work.
|
| I also want to draw contrasts to the indie music scene in
| the mid-aughts and the situation with Nintendo now. A
| number of bands had their music pirated or offered for
| free, but truly appreciated by fans. As a result, these
| bands saw at least moderate successes when they toured:
| fans saw the effort of touring as actual work, rather
| than nickel-and-diming.
|
| Nintendo should be following this "indie" path (continue
| creating innovative games), rather than aggressive rent-
| seeking (legacy IP property protectionism).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I really don't buy that what worked for the indie music
| scene, has anything to do with how Nintendo does
| business. Piracy can, and does, have a serious impact on
| video game sales - about 20% fewer sales according to the
| University of North Carolina
| (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-
| game...).
|
| I also don't buy that Nintendo is forced into an
| either/or. Their strategy is to do both; and it seems to
| be working just fine.
| numpad0 wrote:
| You don't know what "MBA-type" is.
| xattt wrote:
| Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes
| decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing
| out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
| skyyler wrote:
| If they were making decisions based on maxing out profits,
| there would be a Mario Wonder Battle Pass and the gacha
| mechanics in the new zelda would include microtransactions.
|
| Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the
| gamers really upset.
| numpad0 wrote:
| _The guys you don 't mess with_.
| seventhtiger wrote:
| Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their
| IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To
| them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how
| your work is presented in public, which includes things like
| tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on.
|
| A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a
| visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-
| authorities-make-thei...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies
| you realize its not that nintendo is fake "japanese" and has
| this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through
| including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any
| japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm.
| Same thing. Market on "creative, different, japanese" but its
| really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in
| to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize
| the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get
| a little sad of the route they instead trot down.
|
| For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the
| modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the
| american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their
| logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still
| uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there
| is literally nothing better made as film industry investment
| fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering
| efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras.
| Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they
| don't make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the
| best in their "texas leica" medium format cameras. It is like
| civilization died in this sector and we are living off the
| scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does
| fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing
| newfound industry?
|
| Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to
| forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don't
| want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital
| cameras (even though they probably won't). They have a good
| thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred
| dollar camera bodies. What they don't realize is the film buffs
| today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters
| pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much
| money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for
| leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in
| japanese companies.
|
| Don't even get me started on Toyota.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with
| manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete
| with any of its subsequent consoles after the VCS (although it
| did have some success with its PCs). The consoles were all flawed
| in some way. They were underpowered, didn't offer much over the
| previous iteration, or simply didn't have a strong enough library
| of games to compete. Atari was famously slow to realize that
| maybe people want more out of a game console than home ports of
| decade-old arcade games. On top of that, their original games
| that weren't home ports were mostly lackluster or were just
| outside of what gamers of the time were demanding.
|
| Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of
| Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms
| were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
|
| EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and
| Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games,
| publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade
| games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into
| Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but
| Tengen was going strong.
| duxup wrote:
| I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you
| knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system.
| You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant
| tech wise.
|
| Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES
| games looked / got better year to year.
| toast0 wrote:
| Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games.
| If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like
| Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual
| quality.
|
| It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course.
| And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| It's not about visual quality so much as the complete
| inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in
| games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was _still_
| hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US
| alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800
| launched with... Centipede.
| ndiddy wrote:
| You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little
| confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home
| and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari
| Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all
| the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST
| line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with
| Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had
| nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the
| Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason
| why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split,
| Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market
| using the Atari name.
|
| I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end.
| Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after
| the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only
| stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game
| related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Ahh, I always forget Atari Corporation and Atari games were
| different. Thanks for the correction.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management
| showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of
| their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al
| Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the
| technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but
| management kept the product going far beyond its intended
| lifetime.
|
| The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The
| Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to
| the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better
| controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600
| compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder
| row to hoe when they came to the US.
|
| Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute
| the NES in the US...
|
| (Some people write speculative fiction about world wars
| having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is
| to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack
| Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga
| went to Atari, etc.)
| jerf wrote:
| Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600
| era and could never move on from it.
|
| Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is
| completely disconnected in personnel several times over from
| the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of
| game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days
| ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute
| video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what
| I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.)
|
| And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600
| games with better graphics. If you really, really like that,
| they've got you.
|
| Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is
| vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time,
| but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them
| somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money
| with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also
| imprinted.
|
| Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier
| outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and
| was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was
| also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at
| all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but
| definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after
| that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the
| entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star
| Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but
| definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not
| mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by
| the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a
| genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but
| the genre-definer. And so forth.
|
| Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they
| did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in
| some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has
| some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and
| Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like
| Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the
| first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what
| came before only prettier". It shows effort.
|
| The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of
| the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is
| recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely
| unplayable unless you read the manual.
|
| "Never moved on" isn't entirely fair to the modern
| incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company
| intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation,
| T-shirts, etc. It's not that they haven't moved on, it's that
| this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the
| brand. It's a choice, not inertia.
| jerf wrote:
| It's not a literal point, it's an observation of how far
| we've come. A single texture blows away 2600 and NES games
| in size quite handily. The emulation effort for either is a
| sneeze compared to what we pour into a single frame
| nowadays. Compared to modern stuff they're both just
| primitive beyond primitive as far as a modern kid is
| concerned.
|
| And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't
| understand that so many people seem to have in their brains
| that if you explain _why_ a thing is true, it is no longer
| true. I do not understand it. Explaining _why_ they haven
| 't moved on does not suddenly make it so they have moved
| on. They haven't moved on. Best of luck to them but I doubt
| it's going to work very well as a strategy in 2025 any more
| than it did in the 1980s.
| MYEUHD wrote:
| What is a "modern kid"? :) Super Mario Bros. 3 is very
| enjoyable, even for a "modern kid"
| HFguy wrote:
| "And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I
| don't understand that so many people seem to have in
| their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it
| is no longer true. I do not understand it."
|
| This is an interesting observation. I've seen the same
| thing.
|
| I think the clue is in the "it is a choice"...perhaps
| they are perceiving seeing some sort of judgement being
| made of Atari implicit in your argument???
|
| In other words, it can be true at the same time that (1)
| The are not moving on and (2) It is a choice.
|
| And #2 does not invalidate #1.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Dude. There is no way in hell they probably even could
| move on. They probably simply do not have the
| organizational structure to develop modern games. They
| are like one of those companies making retro style record
| players. That is their niche. Not trying to go toe to toe
| with nintendo or playstation. Just a completely different
| business model.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Except, the game designers were paid a flat salary, not
| royalties, unlike the rock stars in Warner's stable. In late
| 1979, four defecting Atari designers and one music industry
| executive disrupted the video game console business model by
| aligning it with the recording industry's: Hardware would be just
| hardware, and content would now be supplied by third-party
| content providers. Activision was formed, with a little business
| and legal help from the Sistine Chapel of Silicon Valley law
| firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
|
| I wasn't aware of that story, a lot of irony in there...
| lordfrito wrote:
| Atari tried to sue Activision out of existence, only to have
| the courts affirm Activision's right to make games for the
| 2600.
|
| Prior to this, only OEMs made games for their consoles. That
| court case opened the floodgates for 3rd party game companies
| to exist. Arguably one of the most important lawsuits in the
| history of gaming.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Obligatory: and the rest was history.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they
| managed to have the success they did.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I took a class from an ex-executive. It was trajecially worse.
| Almost every morning for them was a jaw dropping knuckle
| dragging experience.
|
| This is the Harvard text book example of "let the adults handle
| it."
| lordfrito wrote:
| I'm endlessly fascinated by the stories that come out about
| the execs dealings during that period. How they were offered
| and passed on being the American distributor for the NES (all
| because the exec saw Donkey Kong running on a Coleco Adam at
| CES). [0] And how they funded but f'ed up the deal with the
| Amiga chipset (it should have been theirs but Commodore stole
| it at the 11'th hour). [1] Or how they were illegally
| bypassing DRAM price controls in the Tramiel era (the illegal
| $$$ is the main reason Atari stayed afloat after the
| disastrous Federated Group purchase). [2] The list goes on
| and on.
|
| I'm under the impression that there's a lot of real dirty
| stuff that's been swept under the rug, maybe now lost to
| time, as many of the execs are no longer with us. A lot is
| documented in the book "Atari: Business if Fun". [3] A shame
| that the follow up book "Atari: Business is War" will likely
| never be finished. [4]
|
| [0] https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-
| remember-wh...
|
| [1] https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/
|
| [2] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-
| dram-r...
|
| [3] https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-
| Vendel/dp/098...
|
| [4] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-
| business...
| lordfrito wrote:
| Mainly because they were the only game in town back then. At
| the time they were the fastest growing company in history... So
| many $$$, for a time everything they touched turned to gold.
| Being first in a new industry, they made all the mistakes that
| subsequent companies learned from and avoided. For example,
| putting a textiles executive in charge, treating developers
| like assembly line workers, etc.
|
| This all laid the seeds for their subsequent implosion... Epic
| rise, epic fall. I wish someone would make a movie about that
| story.
| EncomLab wrote:
| The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post
| publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate
| game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about
| anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The
| predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to
| STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for
| purchase on the platform.
|
| The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win
| statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a
| new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5
| games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.
| iteria wrote:
| $100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have
| to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces.
|
| This is also the social media game. Building a following is the
| name of the game and the long tail can substant many
| dtagames wrote:
| It definitely isn't a lottery ticket.
|
| Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make
| your game great and then make it popular.
| boxed wrote:
| Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super
| well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it
| even with that kind of competition.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of
| entertainment for people's time and money, certainty
|
| But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually
| don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo
|
| While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and
| "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying
| different niches.
|
| You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony
| releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them
| are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an
| incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which
| cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party
| titles either. Other studios make games that can only be
| played on Switch hardware
|
| It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design
| game consoles that have maintained its individual identity,
| while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just
| a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
| Keyframe wrote:
| You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party
| games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the
| case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a
| toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted
| wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview,
| and others were competing for third party titles and using
| specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if
| same game was available on multiple target platforms and
| you were buying for that.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party
| games
|
| There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party
| games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are
| successful enough, but they do happen
|
| But largely you are correct
|
| The truly impressive part is just how large the First
| Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that
| you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is
| the most valuable franchise in the world
| Keyframe wrote:
| Technically there are also second-party games, which are
| independent companies exclusive to them like those from
| HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid),
| Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but
| yeah.
| hedora wrote:
| I'd argue their last two custom hardware competitors were
| xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games.
|
| (I'm counting competitors as "the game mechanics are more
| important than production values")
|
| In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone
| launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were
| ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party
| physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple
| Arcade).
|
| These days, it's just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I
| used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation
| games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more
| importantly) if you pay for it, there's no way to turn
| off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario,
| making the entire system inappropriate for kids.
|
| I'm curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen
| on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing
| looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about
| an old switch 1 port of a wii game...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The distinguishing feature of Nintendo is they're a toy
| company. That's the angle they approach the whole ecosystem
| from. It tends to result in consoles with features that are
| unusual (or, more specifically, it has ever since they
| decided to get off the CPU/GPU integration competition
| train Sony and Microsoft have first-class tickets on and
| made the Wii instead).
|
| It's also why they released a fancy alarm clock with the
| same breathless excitement as a new game console.
| Narishma wrote:
| > Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC
| port, and many of them are even released on Xbox.
|
| It's the other way around, Microsoft games on PC and more
| recently PS5. Sony sometimes releases their games on PC
| (often years after console) but AFAIK the only one they've
| released on Xbox is MLB The Show and that was MLB forcing
| their hand if they wanted to keep the license.
| toast0 wrote:
| Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it,
| too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same
| way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality.
|
| Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less
| generic games, more organic-made ones.
| RajT88 wrote:
| In praise of niches: Some of my favorite games were widely
| hated, and for reasons which I largely agree with. Not
| everyone values the same things.
| Keyframe wrote:
| On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled,
| but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-
| between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales
| over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the
| horizon will emerge.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| While Steam _could_ do that, there 's no incentive for them
| to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third
| parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on
| letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-
| win.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...
| YesBox wrote:
| The majority of games released on steam are not serious games.
| There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are
| people's first (toy) game.
|
| Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are
| required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality
| product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of
| time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly
| consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game,
| and trailer reveals (ign et al)
|
| Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game
| internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost
| if it converts
| EncomLab wrote:
| This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people
| imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the
| median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is
| estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800,
| with something like 10k making less than $100.
| pdw wrote:
| Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has
| ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.
| thrance wrote:
| I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've
| rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried
| for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.
| EncomLab wrote:
| It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024
| to determine if any great games are being lost among the
| trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really
| understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would
| take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" -
| much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.
| seventhtiger wrote:
| Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on
| steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/iv
| e_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many
| hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of
| discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is
| there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of
| crappy games that is today's landscape.
| seventhtiger wrote:
| Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on
| steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_
| seen_a...
|
| It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems.
| The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about
| hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very
| very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is
| today's landscape.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Steam is not capitalized.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam
| isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The
| fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution
| means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They
| can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't
| matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2
| or Monster Hunter Wilds.
| dtagames wrote:
| This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any
| shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money
| from commissions, not developer sign up fees.
|
| Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is
| over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
| EncomLab wrote:
| I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by
| Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most
| transparent player in the game industry.
| KHRZ wrote:
| At least they had trials back then. Switch emulators last year
| simply got intimidated to abandon their projects.
| ksymph wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article is Nintendo's strongarming of
| retailers. The lawsuit wasn't settled until the mid 90s, and
| Nintendo failed to legally stop cartridge manufacturing until
| then - but what they did do was threaten to pull the NES from any
| store that sold unlicensed games. Most stores complied,
| unsurprisingly.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Hiroshi Yamauchi was highly selective when it came to what games
| could be released for Nintendo consoles.
|
| Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the
| extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and
| marketing than game development.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Nintendo (and Apple, and Microsoft) are the counterpoint story to
| the story that I think a lot of hackers (especially of the open-
| source and DIY variety) tell themselves about the way the world
| works:
|
| There are benefits to both open and closed approaches, and people
| that _really_ prefer each.
|
| Nintendo succeeded in contrast to Atari because they clamped
| their jaws as tightly onto the supply chain as they could. In
| doing so, they created for their users a minimum quality standard
| expectation that could be relied upon: if it ran on Nintendo _at
| all_ , it was a good game. That was the goal.
|
| There's value and comfort in predictability and expectation
| satisfaction. While we shouldn't let the scales tip _too_ far and
| give the exclusive platforms full control, it 's possible for
| them to tip the other way too... A world where one can't create
| and protect a Nintendo is a worse world for end-users.
| ryao wrote:
| Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key?
| Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States
| Copyright Office?
| ndiddy wrote:
| > Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key?
|
| The 10NES chip was a bit more complicated than that. Basically
| the way it worked was that there was a chip in every NES, and
| another chip in every cartridge. On reset, the chip in the NES
| randomly picks 1 of 16 bitstreams, and tells the chip in the
| cartridge which bitstream it chose. Each chip then starts
| continuously sending the chosen bitstream to the other chip. If
| the chip in the NES sees a discrepancy between the generated
| bitstream and the bitstream it received, it will reset the NES.
| This is the cause of the famous NES "blinking red light".
|
| > Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States
| Copyright Office?
|
| If a copyright holder registers their copyright, it amplifies
| their rights (such as granting them a higher amount of damages
| in an infringement lawsuit). Registering the copyright for a
| piece of software involves submitting the first 25 pages and
| last 25 pages of the source code, or the entire code,
| whatever's smaller. The 10NES chip used an extremely simple
| 4-bit microcontroller with only 512 bytes of ROM, so the
| copyright office has the entire source code.
| rvba wrote:
| Quote from the article:
|
| > I would deliver my game software code to Nintendo, who would
| add the secret key to it
|
| Did it really work this way on NES? I thought they only used the
| lockout chip and no signatures, since it would use too much
| processor power 40 years ago
| bityard wrote:
| For anyone reading the description of the NES's copy protection
| scheme in this article and thinking, "that doesn't sound right,"
| you would be correct.
|
| The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the
| console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that
| output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system
| compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets
| once per second.
|
| As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to
| overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse
| engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong
| legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_
| copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at
| least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game
| distributors who tried to work around it.
| juancn wrote:
| The Atari judge agreed: "When the nature of a work requires
| intermediate copying to understand the ideas and processes in a
| copyrighted work, that nature supports a fair use for
| intermediate copying," he wrote. "Thus, reverse engineering
| object code to discern the unprotectable ideas in a computer
| program is a fair use."
|
| Huh... that argument seems to apply to training an AI model.
|
| You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for
| the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted
| work".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-16 17:00 UTC)