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by amiga386
1016 days ago
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Nintendo is just Nintendo, and enough people have bought a console just because of one game (or several games) for them still have enough money to keep being Nintendo. I don't really want to defend them, but you need to look at the North American video game market crash of 1983 to understand their current stance. The entire video game market collapsed, because any old crap was being released as a game. Consumers lost confidence in the "platform" of specific games consoles. If they bought a home computer instead, there would still be games and it had other utility. The NES was the antithesis of this. A walled garden of Nintendo, and plenty of first-party game development. The approach worked, it brought them fortune and made them a major player in the video game market. Why would they abandon this approach if it's still working for them almost 40 years later? |
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Nintendo has occasionally licensed out their brands for other hardware, but it's rare. Examples that come to mind are:
- Home ports of Donkey Kong, most of which came out before the NES
- Various Mario-branded edutainment games and typing tutors[0], which were available for IBM-compatible/WinTel PCs (probably also Mac OS but I don't remember)
- Phillips CDi games such as Hotel Mario and the two Zelda games it got[1]
- Nintendo's spinoff mobile games such as Super Mario Run, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, etc
A general unifying factor is that many of these were garbage. The mobile spinoffs are better, but those were made primarily to appease shareholders angry that the Wii U wasn't selling well. So I imagine Nintendo has had such a bad taste in their mouth from working with third party platforms that they'd rather just not. Furthermore, doing so means having to pay 30%, instead of receiving it from other developers.
[0] One of which was also Charles Martinet's first stint as Mario
[1] Notable for having lots of animated cutscenes that provided ample YouTube Poop material