5 ms·

I am more curious about context here. Nintendo was (and is) a public company. Presumably Microsoft new what a reasonable bid would look like. This sounds like t

by mankyd 6y ago

I am more curious about context here. Nintendo was (and is) a public company. Presumably Microsoft new what a reasonable bid would look like. This sounds like they weren't just laughing at the offer itself.

mikestew 6y ago
They could have been laughing at "your hardware sucks, why don't you do software and Microsoft will do the hardware?" And when you look at the giant-ass (and noisy-ass) box and controllers that were the first Xbox, I'd argue that Nintendo weren't too far off laughing Microsoft out of the room. Of what little I know about Nintendo, there's no way they were sticking their name on that.
- city41 6y ago
  As far as I know, the Switch Joy Cons drift problem is the only hardware issue Nintendo has ever had.
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    They were probably referring more to how powerful it was, not quality issues. And in that way they're still correct to this day, although Nintendo has figured out how to thrive with significantly less powerful hardware than Microsoft and Sony.
    - derefr 6y ago
      Nintendo chooses to use old components in their hardware, though. It's not like they don't have the industry contacts to source more powerful stuff if they want. They just want to have a positive profit margin on selling console hardware. They want hardware sales (and sales of first-party "killer app" software enabled by the hardware) — not third-party software license fees — to be their main revenue stream. Each console or handheld Nintendo puts out follows a formula: * Choose key components (CPU cores, screens on portables, etc.) that are two-to-five year-old, one-or-more generations-behind tech at design time, such that they're in wide manufacturing and easy to source as parts / cheap to license to build themselves. * Add in novel in-house-developed IP cores/ASICs, which allow developers to build games that "do" a lot more than the key components would seem to allow. * Wrap the whole thing in a novel interaction method that makes the console's hardware performance relative to its "console generation" kind of illegible (e.g. the Wiimote, the two screens of the DS, the portability of the Switch, etc.); which de-facto locks in games developed to target the hardware, making them much harder to port away; and which acts as a neato whizz-bang selling point in the form of enabling new "killer apps" (e.g. 3D first-person games with the N64 analog stick; Wii Sports with the Wiimote; Brain Training and other pre-smartphone "apps" with the DS stylus.) Nintendo are at their best (i.e. most profitable) when they double down on this strategy, releasing a seemingly-new hardware "generation" that's really just the same existing hardware but with new/updated IP cores. The Gameboy Color is just an overclocked Gameboy with a better PPU. The Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube with an ARM coprocessor embedding wi-fi/bluetooth/SD card support. Etc. The Switch is a departure from this strategy, in that the Tegra X1 wasn't actually all that old at the time of the Switch's release, and so likely bit into Nintendo's profit-margin on the Switch pretty heavily. I'm sure Nintendo would rather have used a slightly-older part. But there just wasn't anything like the Tegra X1 (in terms of GPU power per watt) until the Tegra X1 — no viable competitors, and no previous generation of the chip to lean on. And they were constrained by wanting to port Wii U games to the Switch, which demanded basically the X1's level of power.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      In 2000, "your hardware sucks" didn't really hold water. The N64 was a cut-down SGI machine -- it had texture filtering, a Z-buffer, and perspective correct texturing. Things the PlayStation didn't have, because in the mid-90s the state of the art in Japanese 3D hardware was to modify sprite blitter chips to do 3D with affine transforms. Nintendo contracted with the American SGI to get SGI tech into the N64, a savvy move. The PlayStation had more polys on the screen at once, but they looked worse. And they had a CD-ROM, which let them undercut Nintendo on the price of games. But the N64 didn't suck. Neither did the Gamecube, which was superior in capability to Sony's sixth-gen offering (though not Microsoft's).
      - Danieru 6y ago
        My theory is residuals from that SGI contract is what allowed SGI Japan to stay alive. They later renamed themselves to to Silicon Studio. Now best known for developing Bravely Default.
      - setpatchaddress 6y ago
        Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for specifically this reason.
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way. Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.
        danbolt 6y ago
        I feel like the lack of CD-ROM dissuaded smaller-budget developers (eg: Moon, Vip Ribbon, etc.) and RPG makers like you mention, but I don't know if lacking a CD-ROM ultimately harmed the Nintendo 64's value proposition. The Resident Evil 2 port from Angel Studios was impressive reuse of the console's RSP, but I don't know if those sort of experiences were what Nintendo was going for or what it's audiences wanted anyway. I do think the PlayStation with it's CD-ROM drive did better with a broadening audience especially as the NES crowd grew older though.
  - dharmab 6y ago
    N64 controllers had reliability issues due to games like Mario Party wearing out the sticks. Some of the DSes had hinges that would break from normal use.
    - derefr 6y ago
      I think the N64 Mario Party titles would have worn out literally any analog stick used to play them. The fault was more in the game-mechanic design, not realizing exactly what they were asking of the hardware, and not thinking through that the minigames involving rotating the stick would be replayed ad nauseam, thousands of times, for years.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        My N64 sticks wore out through Goldeneye, Zelda, and Mario Kart, no Mario Party needed. It was just a first-gen stick design that didn't hold up.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    There was the Virtual Boy. It was ugly, it was painful to play, and the overall experience was disappointing. I haven't heard of any reliability issues with it, but considering how massive a failure it was it might be that no one ever played one long enough to find out.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Ehh I guess it depends on how long until you expect a hardware issue. The directional pads on gameboys and DSs tend to fail, as well as the sticks on n64 and gamecube controllers
  - btschaegg 6y ago
    Well, the N64 controller's analog stick had a tendency to get really clunky after some time of use (it amassed some kind of "frictiony" feeling in its joint). But then again, the my old console is still going strong. OTOH, my original Xbox refused to boot some years ago…
    - city41 6y ago
      Ah yeah, I forgot about that one. Interesting two of their issues were both related to analog sticks.
    - zeeZ 6y ago
      I have the opposite problem. After many games of Mario Party, the analog stick would be very loose, flopping around without much friction.
wodenokoto 6y ago
Japanese public companies have been known to do a “poison pill” strategy to avoid foreign takeovers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOJ_2007_No.30 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOJ_2007_No.30
- rawgabbit 6y ago
  The wiki article seems like a reasonable defense to prevent corporate raiders from taking over and loading it up with debt while walking away with a fortune for basically crippling a once successful company. See KKR's takeover of TXU electric.

by mankyd 6y ago

mikestew 6y ago

They could have been laughing at "your hardware sucks, why don't you do software and Microsoft will do the hardware?" And when you look at the giant-ass (and noisy-ass) box and controllers that were the first Xbox, I'd argue that Nintendo weren't too far off laughing Microsoft out of the room. Of what little I know about Nintendo, there's no way they were sticking their name on that.

city41 6y ago
As far as I know, the Switch Joy Cons drift problem is the only hardware issue Nintendo has ever had.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  They were probably referring more to how powerful it was, not quality issues. And in that way they're still correct to this day, although Nintendo has figured out how to thrive with significantly less powerful hardware than Microsoft and Sony.
  - derefr 6y ago
    Nintendo chooses to use old components in their hardware, though. It's not like they don't have the industry contacts to source more powerful stuff if they want. They just want to have a positive profit margin on selling console hardware. They want hardware sales (and sales of first-party "killer app" software enabled by the hardware) — not third-party software license fees — to be their main revenue stream. Each console or handheld Nintendo puts out follows a formula: * Choose key components (CPU cores, screens on portables, etc.) that are two-to-five year-old, one-or-more generations-behind tech at design time, such that they're in wide manufacturing and easy to source as parts / cheap to license to build themselves. * Add in novel in-house-developed IP cores/ASICs, which allow developers to build games that "do" a lot more than the key components would seem to allow. * Wrap the whole thing in a novel interaction method that makes the console's hardware performance relative to its "console generation" kind of illegible (e.g. the Wiimote, the two screens of the DS, the portability of the Switch, etc.); which de-facto locks in games developed to target the hardware, making them much harder to port away; and which acts as a neato whizz-bang selling point in the form of enabling new "killer apps" (e.g. 3D first-person games with the N64 analog stick; Wii Sports with the Wiimote; Brain Training and other pre-smartphone "apps" with the DS stylus.) Nintendo are at their best (i.e. most profitable) when they double down on this strategy, releasing a seemingly-new hardware "generation" that's really just the same existing hardware but with new/updated IP cores. The Gameboy Color is just an overclocked Gameboy with a better PPU. The Wii is just an overclocked Gamecube with an ARM coprocessor embedding wi-fi/bluetooth/SD card support. Etc. The Switch is a departure from this strategy, in that the Tegra X1 wasn't actually all that old at the time of the Switch's release, and so likely bit into Nintendo's profit-margin on the Switch pretty heavily. I'm sure Nintendo would rather have used a slightly-older part. But there just wasn't anything like the Tegra X1 (in terms of GPU power per watt) until the Tegra X1 — no viable competitors, and no previous generation of the chip to lean on. And they were constrained by wanting to port Wii U games to the Switch, which demanded basically the X1's level of power.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    In 2000, "your hardware sucks" didn't really hold water. The N64 was a cut-down SGI machine -- it had texture filtering, a Z-buffer, and perspective correct texturing. Things the PlayStation didn't have, because in the mid-90s the state of the art in Japanese 3D hardware was to modify sprite blitter chips to do 3D with affine transforms. Nintendo contracted with the American SGI to get SGI tech into the N64, a savvy move. The PlayStation had more polys on the screen at once, but they looked worse. And they had a CD-ROM, which let them undercut Nintendo on the price of games. But the N64 didn't suck. Neither did the Gamecube, which was superior in capability to Sony's sixth-gen offering (though not Microsoft's).
    - Danieru 6y ago
      My theory is residuals from that SGI contract is what allowed SGI Japan to stay alive. They later renamed themselves to to Silicon Studio. Now best known for developing Bravely Default.
    - setpatchaddress 6y ago
      Lack of CD-ROM was a gigantic problem, though. Doesn't matter if you have better hardware if you can't fit all the content. Square moved to PlayStation for specifically this reason.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        It was a tradeoff. Cartridges cost a lot more but they made piracy a lot harder and loading times nonexistent. In retrospect it seems like a bad move but it could have gone the other way. Ironically, thanks to FPGAs we can now pirate cartridge games on the original hardware easily and without modification, while the situation with disc-based consoles is somewhat trickier. Meanwhile, physical console game distribution has swung back to solid-state media since optical discs simply can't match the capacity or speed.
      - danbolt 6y ago
        I feel like the lack of CD-ROM dissuaded smaller-budget developers (eg: Moon, Vip Ribbon, etc.) and RPG makers like you mention, but I don't know if lacking a CD-ROM ultimately harmed the Nintendo 64's value proposition. The Resident Evil 2 port from Angel Studios was impressive reuse of the console's RSP, but I don't know if those sort of experiences were what Nintendo was going for or what it's audiences wanted anyway. I do think the PlayStation with it's CD-ROM drive did better with a broadening audience especially as the NES crowd grew older though.
- dharmab 6y ago
  N64 controllers had reliability issues due to games like Mario Party wearing out the sticks. Some of the DSes had hinges that would break from normal use.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I think the N64 Mario Party titles would have worn out literally any analog stick used to play them. The fault was more in the game-mechanic design, not realizing exactly what they were asking of the hardware, and not thinking through that the minigames involving rotating the stick would be replayed ad nauseam, thousands of times, for years.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      My N64 sticks wore out through Goldeneye, Zelda, and Mario Kart, no Mario Party needed. It was just a first-gen stick design that didn't hold up.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  There was the Virtual Boy. It was ugly, it was painful to play, and the overall experience was disappointing. I haven't heard of any reliability issues with it, but considering how massive a failure it was it might be that no one ever played one long enough to find out.
- asdff 6y ago
  Ehh I guess it depends on how long until you expect a hardware issue. The directional pads on gameboys and DSs tend to fail, as well as the sticks on n64 and gamecube controllers
- btschaegg 6y ago
  Well, the N64 controller's analog stick had a tendency to get really clunky after some time of use (it amassed some kind of "frictiony" feeling in its joint). But then again, the my old console is still going strong. OTOH, my original Xbox refused to boot some years ago…
  - city41 6y ago
    Ah yeah, I forgot about that one. Interesting two of their issues were both related to analog sticks.
  - zeeZ 6y ago
    I have the opposite problem. After many games of Mario Party, the analog stick would be very loose, flopping around without much friction.

wodenokoto 6y ago

Japanese public companies have been known to do a “poison pill” strategy to avoid foreign takeovers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOJ_2007_No.30 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOJ_2007_No.30

rawgabbit 6y ago
The wiki article seems like a reasonable defense to prevent corporate raiders from taking over and loading it up with debt while walking away with a fortune for basically crippling a once successful company. See KKR's takeover of TXU electric.