calibrator{at}freenet.de wrote in news:

> Nintendo made some mistakes with the N64 on its own: One of
> the most important being clinging to cartridges (which were very
> expensive for the third parties as they had to pay a fee for
> every produced cartridge and not only the sold ones).
> The third parties flew to Sony in droves - including SquareSoft -
> the leading Japanese RPG producer at that time. *This* really
> hurt Nintendo.

Definitely. If you go back to the 16-bit era, the Genesis performed well in 
the US and Europe, but in Japan it really had no chance against the SNES 
because the latter got most of the RPGs.

> Sony only wanted license fees for every *sold* game, AFAIK,
> and they more and more targetted the adult market.
> Also the CD format offered much more storage space - and Sony
> made sure that it got used: They encouraged movie sequences,
> sound tracks in CD-format and enforced(!) 3D games. In fact
> they refused permission for many 2D games...

CDs were also much cheaper; 55 cents to make a CD game versus $20 to make a 
cartridge. This resulted in N64 games reaching prices of up to $70.

> While I agree that the N64 is more advanced, though different in
> some details, than the PS1, the Saturn is more different than
> advanced. It really is a 2D-machine and Sega missed the 3D
> trend (see the emerging market of 3D games and 3D
> accelerator cards for PCs at that time). That's why most of the
> Saturn 3D games look really ugly: It texturized the surfaces in
> part with hardware sprites - low resolution - and offered no real
> transparency rendering (the PS1 had 5 bits and the N64 8 bits,
> IIRC).

The Saturn's dual processors theoretically made it more powerful, but also 
made it difficult to program. It's 3D capabilities were weak because it was 
originally meant to be a 2D system, and Sega hastily tacked on 3D 
capabilities to compete with the PSX. The Saturn actually did quite well in 
Japan where it had a nice library of RPGs, but failed in the US because of 
Sega's inept marketing. For one, they didn't believe that Americans would 
go for RPGs and thus refused to bring them over from Japan.

Both the Saturn and N64 also had memory-expansion capabilities (though the 
former's never made it out of Japan), while the PSX was limited to 1MB of 
memory.
 
> The N64 came more than 18 months later - of course it was
> technically advanced - but the real breaktrough of the PS1 came
> when all three machines were on the street: 1997 - with the
> second and third wave of PS1 titles: Technically already very
> advanced, targetting the male adult audience more than ever
> and with very nice things like the overhyped Final Fantasy VII.
> By 1998 it had stomped its competition into the ground and
> Sony got cocky.

In the end, the N64's greater power was moot because it's cartridges maxxed 
out at 64MB and could not hold much graphics data. Finally, it might as 
well have been a 32-bit system because almost all it's games were written 
with 32-bit code for both performance and space reasons.
 
> In fact, the N64 initially also sold well at launch but then faltered
> because Nintendo didn't have enough titles in the pipeline and
> they couldn't get as many third parties as Sony.

In Japan at the time, Nintendo's image was golden, and after their past 
successes they seemingly could do no wrong. So on the N64's launch day, 
everybody rushed out to buy them, but ended up being really disappointed.

> This is a lesson Nintendo tried to remedy with the Gamecube:
> They made the deal for exclusivity with Capcom for the Resident
> Evil franchise (at least for a certain time) and had other nice titles
> like "Eternal Darkness". Ultimately, it was too late: The cute cube
> was seen as a machine for young gamers and not yet as a casual
> machine.

The Gamecube ended up getting the moniker "Barney's Purple Purse". It's 
silly minidisks were partially to prevent piracy (a thing Nintendo was long  
obsessed with) and to improve loading time (since the minidisks were 
smaller, they had a higher rotation speed). Nintendo really didn't help 
their cause by saying that the disks were "small enough to easily fit in a 
child's hand".
 
> When the PS2 became the most successful console of all time
> it did so *because* Sony not only got the "hard core gamers" but
> also the casuals - with its EyeToy and several music games.
> 
> Interestingly, Sony wasn't able to recognize this new trend (they
> expoited for quite some time themselves!) for it's next machine.
> Instead they still dreamt of designing a machine powerful enough
> "for the next ten years" - with a Bluray drive to support other parts
> of the company...

Sony was like Nintendo in 1996. They had enjoyed so much past success that 
they though they were unstoppable. At least they could boast that they 
managed to keep Squaresoft in their camp, something Nintendo wasn't able to 
say back then.
 
> The next thing they missed was the compatibility with PS2
> games: The people still played their old games and didn't buy
> the even more expensive PS3 games - and the compatibility
> was dropped as a result (first the chips flew out, then the
> software emulator). The price was lowered to sweeten the
> ugly deal but it's still too expensive for the casual market...

The PS2's success was partially due to backwards compatibility with the 
PSX. Meanwhile, the Wii is Nintendo's first console able to play it's 
predecessor's games (something their handhelds have long benefitted from).
 
> Sony also underestimated their main competitor: Microsoft,
> which is known to be a very aggressive, who tries to annihilate
> every form of competition if possible and sensible to them.
> 
> Microsoft didn't give up their costly Xbox1-experiment and won
> most of the hearts of American (and later European) "hard core
> gamers with the Xbox 360.

As long as there's Halo, there will be a market for the Xbox line.
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32