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That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices. Nowadays there's less stigma att

That's very interesting. I know nothing about him, but I'm very intrigued to hear more about his ruthless business practices. Nowadays there's less stigma attached to the idea of being a ruthless businessman. In fact, it's often considered meritous. So I don't think it would be disrespectful to highlight some of the things he's done. After all, it's a testament to what it took to build a company of the caliber of Nintendo. What sort of strategies did he employ?

tinco 13y ago
Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it. But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous. Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit. Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self. I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  that game was tetris, and youtube has a fascinating documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo sillysaurus2: this has some of yamauchi being a ruthless sumbitch.
- DanielleMolloy 13y ago
  I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system. Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market. R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.
  - fwonkas 13y ago
    Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
    - irishcoffee 13y ago
      I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
    - DanielleMolloy 13y ago
      @fwonkas: OK, thanks for clarifying this!
- simonh 13y ago
  Thanks, great summary but Apple doesn't determine the price of apps on the App Store. On the other hand Amazon does do that on their Android app store.
throwawaichi 13y ago
It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"
magoghm 13y ago
There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/0679736220/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1379593149&sr=8-6&keywords=game+over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...
jader201 13y ago
There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...

tinco 13y ago

Well for example the shelve management of the cartride game systems. If you would want to produce a game for the SNES, to actually distribute it you would have to put it on a cartridge and sell it. But the design and specifications of these cartridges was protected by Nintendo, so the only way to distribute a game was to ask Nintendo for cartridges. Because Nintendo would only allow quality games on its shelves, it would test your game before allowing you any cartridges, so your game basically had to be nearly finished before you could ask Nintendo for cartridges. Of course if you were refused at this point you would have already invested tons of money so it would be pretty ruinous. Besides the go/no-go signal, Nintendo also controlled the _amount_ of cartridges you would get. If Nintendo decided (much like Apple did in recent years) that your game was more valuable if it had limited copies, then you wouldn't get many copies, regardless if that would leave you with not enough revenue to make a profit. Reasons for refusal of cartridges were both fair and rather unfair. For example you could be refused for lack of quality, but you could also be refused because another game in your genre already had shelve space and they didn't want to endanger its dominance. Basically you were at the complete mercy of how Nintendo wanted to make maximum profit for it self. I have heard, though I don't know for sure (maybe someone could check it :P) that Atari eventually went bankrupt because it decided to make a Nintendo game (as a last resort perhaps), got into a conflict with Nintendo, sued them, and lost..

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
that game was tetris, and youtube has a fascinating documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9dO_iL7lo sillysaurus2: this has some of yamauchi being a ruthless sumbitch.
DanielleMolloy 13y ago
I disagree. The quality control system of the major video game console manufacturers (not only Nintendo is doing this) is what keeps the amount of bugs and major game design flaws they contain at the release time in control (i.e. low) until today. It is the reason for that I still rather buy a just-released console title than a just-released PC game. Everybody who is watching the PC game industry will have come across release disasters that made the games simply unplayable. I'd also rather pay a little more for titles that I can keep in the attic, and where I know that they still work after 20 years, when the patches are not available online anymore (our Master System games still work perfectly). If some major new-to-the-console-gaming-market company had gotten the point about this in the mid 2000's and wouldn't have allowed the game manufacturers to make major bug fixes to their titles after release, we still would have mostly bug-free console titles on every major system. Atari is relevant here for a different reason, since their Atari 2600 partly failed because they did not have good quality control schemes, and because low-quality buggy third-party titles flooded the market (famous examples: PacMan, E.T. - The Extraterrestrial). Consumers simply lost interest in spending money for titles that didn't work (something I would like to see in the PC market today). A couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System won the customers back partly because they controlled their market. R.I.P. Hiroshi Yamauchi.
- fwonkas 13y ago
  Actually, both Pac-Man and E.T. were developed and published by Atari itself. That's not to say that third-party garbage wasn't a major (and probably the primary) problem.
  - irishcoffee 13y ago
    I actually owned and played both those games on the 2600 when I was a kid. As it turns out, they were very buggy (and for me to recognize this as a child says something). Not refuting your point, just an anecdotal comment.
  - DanielleMolloy 13y ago
    @fwonkas: OK, thanks for clarifying this!
simonh 13y ago
Thanks, great summary but Apple doesn't determine the price of apps on the App Store. On the other hand Amazon does do that on their Android app store.

throwawaichi 13y ago

It's fake, but a few years ago there was a story about a meeting between him and Steve Ballmer. Google for "HEY, BALLMER, WHY DON'T YOU SUCK MY TINY YELLOW BALLS?"

magoghm 13y ago

There is a very good description in this book: "Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World" http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/0679736220/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1379593149&sr=8-6&keywords=game+over http://www.amazon.com/Game-Over-Nintendo-Conquered-World/dp/...

jader201 13y ago

There's an ars technica article [1] that dives deep into the early industry of video games and how Nintendo held such a tight -- almost monopolistic -- rein over its third parties. A very good read, and I found it very interesting how Nintendo did things then that there's no way would work in today's business. [1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-insid...