Posted by sohkamyung 3 days ago
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.
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.
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.)
i had one of the home computer division marketing types come to my office one day, and was asked:
"can you print out all possible 8x8 bitmaps? we'd like to submit them to the copyright office so no one else can use them"
a stunning lack of knowledge of copyright law and basic exponential math. i didn't bother to point out that he really wanted all possible 8x8 _color_ bitmaps (there aren't enough atoms in the universe for this, by many orders of magnitude)
they didn't make very good decisions about consoles or computers, either
What was asked for is a reasonable ask. It just isn't possible to create.
No it isn't. You don't get any copyright protection on a volume of data produced by rules, such as "every possible 8x8 bitmap". Furthermore, you also don't get copyright protection against "copies" that were developed without reference to your work, as would always be the case for this idea. So there is no theoretical benefit from attempting it.
What's the reasonable part?
Specialization is a good thing. However it means you will have often ideas that because of something you don't know are bad even though within your lane they are good.
Wanting to copyright them to block competition is despicable.
I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.
However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Donkey Kong Country was all Rare, except for use of the Donkey Kong character. If you look carefully at the DK sprite, you can even see design elements from Battletoads in there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMXi1lAVow
Atari just never did....anything. It's so obvious in retrospect why the died.
They did have some interesting handhelds in later years, but didn't have enough good ideas to make them catch on.
Jeremy Parish’s YouTube channel does a fantastic job of documenting this on the NES and other consoles.
If Atari has been able to survive significantly longer I’m sure they would have learned too.
FWIW various Atari incarnations did try to move on to newer stuff but they all ended up with various levels of fail. The current Atari incarnation is probably the most (relatively) successful this side of the 2000s - though they're probably also (relatively) the smaller one.
I think they were close to closing shop before deciding to focus on the retro and indie gaming stuff.
Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel?
However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too.
In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games.
By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more.
The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had.
The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap.
So it didn’t do well at all.
Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.
Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets.
(There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
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.
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
I sort of understand the difference though...essentially steam's income stream is somewhat from gamers but you also make money from developers, and so there's no real incentive for devs to try too hard. That's why the "crash" hasn't happened yet.
The retailer had to be much more of a curator. I'd be unsurprised if plenty of them lacked the knowledge and foresight to pick winners, so they ended up with racks full of lemons (like the famously bad 2600 Pac-Man) that eventually had to be flogged off at clearance prices. This also made it hard to have a breakout hit-- even if you did everything technically right, was it going to be in the right stores in the right quantity when lightning struck?
Part of it was also, of course, that the 2600 was running out of gas as a platform, it was going to be harder and harder to keep interest up, but that could have been more of a gradual fizzle (like how 8-track tapes or pre-revivial vinyl faded from the market) instead of a dramatic pop.
With digital distribution and a "pay on purchase" selling model, Valve can stock 170,000 titles without any real risk on their part. At worst, the search tools get a bit clumsier, but it's easy enough to put "trending/popular/liked by friends" features in place, and "Lamia Princess Dating Sim XVI" is still there waiting for the 6 people who want it... until it goes viral and sells six hundred thousand copies.
Were you complaining about too many crappy Flash games being available at its heights ?
More generally, are you complaining about too many people, most of them amateurs, making their art available on the Internet ?
Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.
Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
In the early days the value proposition for both sides was staked on curation, but yeah you're totally right: their install base expanded until it encompassed enough people who don't mind having barrels of slop shoveled down their way... and that allowed them to do away with the curation.
But if you're on the other side of the equation that's paying for the privilege of being in dumped into the slop trough it's not a good deal.
You're paying the same amount to get dumped into a cesspit with minimal support as the earliest titles were paying to be hand picked like a golden child and paraded around high-intent buyers.
This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many
Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.
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.
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
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
(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...
It's also why they released a fancy alarm clock with the same breathless excitement as a new game console.
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.
Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Nintendo reportedly has $15 billion in cash, while PlayStation and Xbox are both marginal
Framing Nintendo as "the small one" is funny :)
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.
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
by what bizarro metric is Nintendo more successful than Toyota? debt to equity ratio is all you care about?
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
Businesses may be comfortable operating in massive debt but it's clearly only sustainable for so long
Businesses operating under the kinds of debt loads they take on are what leads to irresponsible government bailouts to keep "key industries" from collapsing when they are unable to service their debt
Sure, Toyota is "successful" until it isn't, and then their debt comes due and they can't pay so it collapses
We should be encouraging more companies to be responsible like Nintendo
Copyright doesn't work that way. You're thinking of trademark law, which only covers how you can name things in commerce, not what you can and can't copy.
The only thing about copyright that's use-it-or-lose-it is fair use, and only because of how English-language[0] legal systems work. You may have heard that Japan "doesn't have fair use", but what that really means is that they don't have binding precedent. This gives copyright owners an incentive to litigate novel reuses of their work early and often.
Nintendo, of course, is the kind of company that doesn't need an excuse to sue someone; but it does explain why they tend to be very slightly more litigious in common-law countries.
I imagine the real reason they released the soundtrack app is to keep third-parties out of their business. i.e. they don't have to pay 30% to Apple or deal with Spotify's shitty "pay out of a pot" system if their soundtracks are just an NSO benefit.
[0] Yes, I know this is "English-heritage" not "English-language", but in practice this is a language split.
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.
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.
This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand.
This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too.
I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library.
The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...
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.
Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the gamers really upset.
I chose 1980 because that's when Space Invaders came out for the VCS. And $20 was, IIRC, the going rate for the average VCS cartridge.
That is $86 in today money.
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.
The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed.
Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market.
Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures.
There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals.
If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway.
You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you".
[0] Japanese domestic market
[1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes!
[2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple.
[3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.
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.”
You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".
I had to re-read this sentence a couple of times. Players is an overloaded term here when we're already thinking about video games, and the other interpretation would mean the opposite (too many customers) of what the author intended (too many sellers).
> Three years later, competitor Sega introduced the Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). Both companies had learned from the crash and took steps to prevent third-party developers from releasing unapproved games.
This implies that the MD/Genesis shipped with a lockout mechanism, which is not true. TMSS didn't exist until the seventh revision (VA6 board) of the console: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions
It also focuses on the Sega vs. Accolade case and fails to mention EA's clean-room reverse-engineering: https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.c...
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.
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.
It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari.
It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around.
Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg.
That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure."
Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history.
Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
Atari "Raiders of the Lost Ark" seemed to be a game that sold very well on name value, but it was hard dexerity, and required reading the manual, and so most people probably didn't make it more than about 5 screens in. That and Atari "Pac-Man" and a few other games, and HEY Atari is just ripping us off!!
"E.T." was pretty half-assed, but IMO a big part of it was the entire game design was not all that entertaining to begin with. It was "Superman" with pits.