| > ensure games sold for the platform "just work" To add a little more color to this, it wasn't solely to ensure games worked. The lesson of the video game crash was that third party publishers would make knock-off games similar to popular titles and flood the market with them at much lower cost - sometimes as low as $5 vs for a $40 for a top title. These games were generally low budget and rushed to market to capitalize on looking like a top-selling title - while being just different enough to (hopefully) avoid trademark infringement. These games usually "worked" (as in booting up and playing), the issue was more that that they were just bad versions of the title they were ripping off due to having little development time and minimal play testing along with poorer artwork and fewer levels (thus saving ROM memory). The flood of cheap, bad versions of more popular games is credited as the main factor that killed the Atari VCS. Another big factor was that later console manufacturers charged game publishers a license fee for the proprietary library code required for a console to run a game. This fee could allow manufacturers to sell game consoles at cost or even below cost and recoup the lost profit over time in the per game license fee. This wasn't always the case in the early days of hardware cartridge systems. Initially, some early console manufacturers didn't charge much more than a game publisher could buy blank cartridges for from a third party. Some other manufacturers chose to generate revenue simply by building more margin into the wholesale price they charged game publishers for blank cartridges. Of course, when console manufacturers started increasing their cartridge profit margin, game publishers were motivated to use third party cartridges - which led to console makers deploying "genuine hardware" checks or, later, disc checks and encryption. Nintendo popularized enforcing their business model both technically and legally (by requiring an IP license). Today, console manufacturer business models rely on 1) Collecting per game license fees, 2) Blocking piracy, 3) Limiting game supply. There is a lot of interesting history around how game console business models and the legal landscape evolved over time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....) |