Nintendo was right to backstab Sony over the PlayStation

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Seeing what Disney has done to some of the ip they bought I feel Nintendo not being consumed by Sony was for the best.

So Nintendo's mistake wasn't betraying Sony, it was agreeing to work with them in the first place

Sony was basically going to own Nintendo with this deal. Nintendo was crazy to have signed it to begin with.

One detail people omit from these sorts of videos that I think is actually critically important: in 1991 SONY filed the patent that effectively describes the planned SNES CD add-on. Said patent never mentions Nintendo by name in spite of using drawings that clearly resemble a SNES. The patent was eventually granted in 1994 and lasted until 2008. The amount of damage this patent did itself to Nintendo could not be understated. Sony theoretically had the power to sue Nintendo if they tried to make a CD add-on without them. Not only would such a lawsuit be costly, but Nintendo's best chance of winning would require them to lose face by reaching out to Sega and NEC for help. The patent was vague enough that it could be for any Nintendo system, which means the N64 could not use a CD add-on legally, either!

For the customer, having a competitor was the best thing to happen

That sound chip was truly next Gen tech at the time. It's insane how much it added to games.

Nintendo was smart in cutting off Sony, but Sega wasn't during their deal with Sony. After the Sony/Nintendo deal fell through, Sony went to Sega, but Sega Of Japan turned them down. Sega also turned down Silicon Graphics, the company responsible for the graphics of the N64. If Sega didn't make these mistakes, they'd probably still be making consoles today.

Nintendo is infamous for their God tier integrity. For example, they very rarely expand. When they made tons of money with Wii and DS, they didn't expand, they just stockpiled cash. Cash they used to survive during the Wii U flop. Another company would have expanded, then crash and burn during a flop, then being bought by another company. This has happened to A LOT of companies in various industries. They go for record fast growth, only to crash a few years later and being bought by a larger fish. Nintendo is also famous for their stock buyback, everything to keep control of the company. Neither Blackrock, Saudi Arabia or Vanguard owns a controlling share of Nintendo. When Microsoft wanted to buy Nintendo in the early 00s, Nintendo just laughed them off. I think this is important to remember when people see the three market leaders today. One is a software company with monopoly like status of PC operating systems. One is a huge giant that operates in movie, home electronics, music and videogame industries. And one is just a videogame company. People often wonder why Nintendo never branch out or expand, but that's because they don't want to, as it put them at risk of crashing and then losing all their independence.

One Nintendo magazine called it the Grey Station

December 3, 2024 marks the original PlayStation's 30th birthday. Let that sink in.

Nobody is talking about Phillips. They were the ones who got screwed the most in all this. The Phillips-Nintendo add-on fizzled. The CD-i did get to use Mario and Zelda but they were outsourced and were terrible games. I think Nintendo's betrayal worked out great for both Sony and Nintendo. Sony got more motivated to compete. Nintendo got to protect power, profits, and their IPs. Nintendo basically used Phillips as a pivot to get out of the Sony deal. Sega of Japan are the real idiots. Sony went to Sega and they rejected them. Then they rejected Silicon Graphics which would then team up with Nintendo to do Project Reality which would later be known as the Ultra 64 by 1995 and then Nintendo 64 by 1996. Sega's biggest problem other than Sega of Japan's lack of foresight and meddling with Sega of America is they only had one blockbuster franchise in North America: Sonic. Virtua Fighter was big but mostly in Japan. Most of Sega's IPs are from the arcade but they still lack the mass appeal of Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon.

They need to make a biopic on Ken and have the movie climax when Norio gives him permission to develop the PlayStation.

I’m most amused that in the context of the present… cartridges ended up the winning medium. Faster and potential for more storage than current discs.

I think having Sony pursue constant growth like this was also their own poison pill as well. Their thirst for growth and unsustainable hardware dev ended up having the whole PlayStation department get moved over to California. I want to think Nintendo ultimately triumphed in the end, but it took a whopping 20+ years to get to that point.

It’s good to see this story being covered in the West. This background has been widely known among Japanese video game fans since that interview with Maruyama. Also it’s said Kutaragi was almost acting alone and wasn’t liked inside Sony. Nintendo did tell their new deal with Phillips to Sony before the conference, but the executives didn’t inform Kutaragi about the news dliberately, and he was the only one really “backstabbed” here.

The decision by Nintendo to abandon the Nintendo-Sony joint console project is understandable. Sony back then was kinda Apple Inc of today; The most powerful consumer electronics company in the world. So fear of Nintendo is justified enough.

Great video! The Sony fallout was Nintendo's biggest stumbling block, but also arguably one of their best. Not only for the reasons already outlined in this video, but Sony's entrance to the market with their own console gave the competition that Nintendo needed to continue to innovate, and of course Sony had a lot to prove. It is a shame that this cost Nintendo a lot of third party developer support, but they were able to weather the storm and have remained the name synonymous with video games.

Nintendo going back to cartridges I can understand, because there is so much more information that can be stored now (Like SD cards) and the read & write speeds are substantially faster than anything an optical disk can provide. Games can be run off the cartridge, lessening the need for internal storage. Physical media all the way

I read one time that it was because Sony wanted marketing rights to Nintendo’s characters