Could some knowledgeable person shed some light on the relationship

I believe Nintendo for example left it up to the game's publisher to run ads, sell to stores, etc., while possibly manufacturing shells and PCBs themselves with fees coming in from developers.
I say this because I recall reading that Ken Kutaragi managed to swing a lot of third parties to PlayStation on the fact that Sony controlled all of the CD-R manufacturing and since they were cheap there would be no fees, and that Sony would go to retailers and handle wholesale and even marketing for many third party games (Final Fantasy VII).

There wasn't any single company if that's what you're asking. Just like now, manufacturing was all outsourced to China. Some big studios designed their own PCBs and memory controllers, others licensed existing designs. I think Nintendo had some first party PCB and shells that developers could buy, but it's not like Nintendo was personally manufacturing them or anything.

Licensing is a completely separate issue from manufacturing. When developing a Nintendo game, you had to send them a copy for review and they would license the game, assuming it met Nintendo's guidelines. If you tried to release unlicensed games, they'd hit you with frivolous lawsuits that most companies didn't want to deal with, but you still saw some.

>>3862526
>Licensing is a completely separate issue from manufacturing

Yes, I'm somewhat conscious of the pre-manufacturing process, beginning with publisher <> vendor courtship all the way to the end of a game's production. (based on the official SNES developer manual)

I was more interested in the economics and logistics of things once a game was given final approval for public consumption.

Then if Nintendo didn't itself produce the cartridge shells, did they mandate a specific design so that all games would look the same, like a franchise restaurant? The only one I can think of that stood out was the red Doom cartridge.

>>3862578
I think the cartridge design was mandated by the licensing agreement. Check the back of the official NES developer manual, it has all the licensing info.

>>3862526
>>3862339
none of this is correct, Nintendo completely controlled production during the NES era. This has been documented in multiple sources, including Game Over and Console Wars.

You played by Nintendo's rules and paid their prices, or they left you out in the cold. This is why companies like Tengen went to such lengths to reverse engineer the lockout chip, with the added bonus of circumventing the 5 titles a year limitation that Nintendo imposed on publishers.

Publishers had to pay Nintendo, in full, up front, and Nintendo took their cut up front. The publisher assumed 100% of the risk.

>>3862589
true

did you know Hiroshi Yamauchi wasn't actually a human being? He was a vessel that enclosed 7 yakuza oni spirits from 7 different regions in Japan. These oni monopolized the gambling in Japan with the hanafuda Nintendo cards and put a spell so that no other company could produce cards, truly evil.

Yamauchi, often referred to as "大魔王 ティラノ天堂" (Great Evil King Tyranotendo), tyranized the video games market with his monopolic practises, it is said that the Master System or the PC Engine didn't actually ever exist, and that they were invented time after so hide the fact that the Famicom was actually the one and only console existing in Japan.

>>3862903
But do we know if that was all still the case for the N64 period? Or for the whole SNES run?

NES dominated the marketplace. SNES and N64 had much tougher competition. While I can see Nintendo not changing their policies for as long as possible, at a certain point they had to have made things easier for 3rd parties. Unless other companies were just as bad, they would've lose all 3rd party support otherwise.

>>3864974
Well that's the exact reason the N64 lost so many third parties. Sega was not as bad as Nintendo but Nintendo was the market leader for years, so if you wanted a game to really sell, you needed the Nintendo audience. PS1 finally offered the ability to buck the system because Sony offered so much freedom with their system of manufacturing etc., as well as having the clear technological advantage and market share over it's 1994 competition. Maybe if the N64 had used discs companies like Square would've stayed onboard but overall the PS1 had too much of a lead by 1996 that it would have been too late for that to be a reason to stay.