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Which Retro Hardware Producer had the best business strategy, and why?
Nintendo gets a lot of shit for their allegedly draconic licensing policies back in the day, but you've got to hand it to them, they had a pretty smart development cycle. They'd wait for technologies to mature and drop in price, then incorporate them creatively into a product which was inferior to the competition in raw sum of specs, but outperformed them in price without sacrificing entertainment value. And once technology got even cheaper, they would even resupply functions missing in the original revisions via (then cheap) expansions, like they did with the FDS, the NES Memory Mappers, the SFX2 chip, and the N64 expansion pack. With handhelds (being generally cheaper to produce) they instead opted for gradual improvements with fairly constant price, while downwards compatibility secured a large userbase and library of games. In both respects, they happily rode the wave of Moore's law, so to speak.
The 6502 Processor driving the NES was ancient (by today's industries standards) when the NES was released internationally. The original Game boy was the only major handheld platform of its generation without an expensive color LCD, but it had good battery life, which was cheap to implement. The specs of the Wii are laughable at best. The Switch is an overpriced smartphone with cheap plastic controller attachments but still manages to be more fun than smartphones.
Admittedly, this strategy has sometimes backfired (like it did with the Virtual Boy), where they ended up with a pile of undesirable garbage. But overall, it secured their place in the industry over the decades. Nintendo is ancient but still somehow manages to stay relevant. They used to be a playing card company founded in 1889, for fucks sake.
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>popular game X is bad
>248 replies
>check out this hot new meme from /v/
>174 replies
>attempt at serious discussion
>0 replies
never change, /vr/.
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>>4242806
>where they ended up with a pile of undesirable garbage
You better mean that in terms of general success as a product bitch
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>>4242806
Atari
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>>4243873
>Atari
>good business strategy
please tell me you are joking.
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>>4242806
How do you work out prices like these to the current year equivalent?
Is there a calculator online, or do I really have to assume a change of +/- 2.5% in inflation rates between each year?
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>>4243901
There's calculators online that let you correct for inflation.
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>>4243876
Yes
Thoroughly and blatantly
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>>4244062
I dunno, to be fair, you could make a point out of them quickly saturating the market and have to acknowledge their rapid growth. they had plenty of cash to burn at their height.
But their failure to plan ahead and their preliminary demise and ultimate end as an appendage to some other company completely disqualifies them form being considered good strategists.
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>>4242806
Nintendo BY FAR.
They have been the highest earning hardware developer in every generation since the 3rd, excluding only the 8th.
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pic related is why nintendo make so much profit from hardware sales
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Unapologetic obvious bump, because I want to hear more people's opinion on this matter.
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>>4242806
I agree that nintendos "use old hardware interestingly" strat was good, but honestly, i think retro competition isnt a matter of "who was best", but "who was least inept".
Nintendo's autistic dedication to having sole right over their game media formats directly led to the playstation and sony entering games outright.
Sega died because it overinvested in developing too much shit too fast. 32x, CD, Saturn -- too many products out too quick to make sales and a return on investment. Will so little money left, one wrong fart and the company would fail, which is exactly what we saw.
Sony's strat of making a console with secondary media features (with PS1, the CD player, and PS2, DVD) won out. it won out so hard that every console on the market today is also a media center, with access to netflix, youtube, bluray playback, etc. secondary media isnt so obvious in the 90s, but in 6th gen, you see it clearly, with the ps2's DVD player castrating the dreamcast, and GCN's lack of DVD capability putting it behind both sony microsoft's consoles.
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>>4246492
Didn't the GCN outsell the Xbox though? And the Xbox needed a sold-separately accessory kit to play DVDs, which was pretty obnoxious.
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>>4246502
Shit youre right. I was looking at data for first 6 month sales.
And youre right about the dvd kit.
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>>4243873
Short term their strat was fine, so they could have cornered the marked
Mid term they had no plans.
Long term they where actually doomed from the start, because without long term plans, you have move your company like a bumbling retard and let it bleed to death.
>>4244176
Did the N64 receive 2 or 3 hardware revisions? I know it got a second one, but i have never looked into the topic.
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>>4246523
I believe the N64 got about 2 or 3 versions per region. Each version just slowly reduced the number of chips on the board. The very last one removed s-video IIRC.
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>>4242806
>allegedly draconic
>allegedly
No, I'm pretty sure "draconian" is an objective description.
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>>4246552
Im mixed about it.
sure they were harsh terms, but in the post-83 market, they were necessary and made nintendo successful.
As soon as the master system came out, though, the licensing rules became a liability.
Fuck the developer side of it. shitty devs cranking out shitty games are what caused the 83 crash to begin with.
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>>4246567
>they were necessary and made nintendo successful
No and no. Nintendo's success has nothing to do with its retarded licensing and censorship policies. Correlation does not imply causation, Anon.
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>>4246516
I guess so, really close in the long run. Thanks for the clarification.
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>>4246492
OP here. Have to agree, SONY's strategy was pretty astounding, but it always felt like a bit of a gamble to me. They would sell cutting-edge hardware at little to no profit (or even at a loss) initially, in order to establish a user base with enough demand for developers to flock to the platform. They would rely on declining production costs in the long run to eventually turn a profit. This is also evident in the relatively longevity of their consoles.
Well, history would prove them right, I guess. Their winning move really was the multi-media-approach. Why buy a simple CD (or DVD or Bluray etc) player, when for 50$ more, it can also play games? It probably helped that they had a lot of experience in developing and selling multimedia consumer electronics.
>>4246567
This is why I wrote allegedly. Those rules ensured a large market share for their console, which ultimately helped to consolidate the post-83 market and created a de-facto leading platform for publishers to aim for. In the end, consumer profited from this, as there wasn't 10 popular consoles with 10 good games each, but a single one with a frickin 100.
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>>4246595
>They would sell cutting-edge hardware at little to no profit (or even at a loss) initially, in order to establish a user base with enough demand for developers to flock to the platform. They would rely on declining production costs in the long run to eventually turn a profit. This is also evident in the relatively longevity of their consoles
This was actually Sega's strategy.
>Well, history would prove them right, I guess. Their winning move really was the multi-media-approach. Why buy a simple CD (or DVD or Bluray etc) player, when for 50$ more, it can also play games? It probably helped that they had a lot of experience in developing and selling multimedia consumer electronics.
It's like the PS3 and Sony's $3 billion+ dollar loss never happened!
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>>4246595
SONY's strategy proved dangerous over time though, as now the PlayStation brand is basically the only profitable part of the company. They arguably neutered some of their own business with that model, and technology marching on ate their lunch with audio gear.
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>>4246614
Do you think part of SEGAs failure was them, primarily being an arcade developer, trying to bring arcade experience into homes? It worked well during their high times, but as the market changed, arcade ports lost importance and market share on home consoles.
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>>4246617
>playstation
>only profitable venture
Sony still makes run of the mill consumer electronics. Shit like TVs, blu-ray players, PC monitors, the viao line of laptops, home theater equipment, etc etc.
But the most profitable parts of the company are sony pictures and sony music entertainment.
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>>4246627
Sega failed because sega japan and sega usa failed to coordinate l, leading to the two producing excessive amounts of hardware that all cost R&D money, but ended up competing with themselves and leading to a failure of both consumers and developers to adopt their products.
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>>4246627
Sega really lost all of their money on Saturn. The hardware was incredibly expensive to produce and yet Sega entered into a price war with Sony on the PS1.
Not only were they price warring with a much richer company, their losses per console were far deeper too.
The real reason the Dreamcast "failed" was Sega still hadn't paid off their Saturn debts.
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>>4246637
Dreamcast was also sold at a loss, thus compounding the problem.
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>>4246628
I'm aware of that but people aren't buying Sony consumer electronics for the name anymore, especially since the quality has taken a huge dive. VIZIO and other brands have filled that gap for less money. Sony pictures keeps pumping out total flops, it's not looking great. The PS4 is their saving grace right now. Also Sony just owns the VAIO name, they don't make the computers anymore.
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>>4246639
True, but so did Sony on the PS2.
To get a better idea of the Saturn situation, imagine if Neo-Geo priced the AES at the same level as the SNES and Genesis. Alright it's not quite as bad as that, but not too far off. Dreamcast's loss was an ordinary one, Saturn's (after price matching PS1) wasn't.
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>>4246643
>Dreamcast's loss was an ordinary one, Saturn's (after price matching PS1) wasn't.
Right, but thats why i said "compounding the issue".
Sega was in debt already. Sony wasnt. You cant go with a debt-ridden strategy (selling at a loss) when youre already in the red.
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>>4246646
They were in a bad situation. Not selling Dreamcast at a loss risked not having it cheap enough to quickly establish a sufficiently large player base before the PS2's release.
As it turns out, the Dreamcast did well, but not QUITE well enough to insure it.
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>>4246642
Their insurance arm makes mad bank, idiot.
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