As we all know, Nintendo and Sony were working on a SNES add-on, but Nintendo made a deal with Phillips, and that led to the PlayStation.
I hear about how Nintendo betrayed Sony, but why is Nintendo in the wrong? Sony was going to get all the profits for the games. It’s not like Sony was completely innocent. I’m tired of people making the birth of the Playstation seem like the big bully Nintendo screwed over the helpless victim Sony, when Sony was the bigger company at the time.
I think the main reason is how Nintendo went about it, combined with seeing how poorly their decision went.
Nintendo had been partnering with Sony for quite a while, and things were nearly finished. That’s why Sony announced the Nintendo PlayStation. And then, the next day, Nintendo announces that they’d instead switch to Philips, Sony’s competitor. This created the appearance that Nintendo didn’t even tell them about their decisions to switch.
Then there’s the results. The whole reason why Sony was able to make their own PlayStation was that the two had been working so long on the Nintendo version. Philips had none of that. There’s a reason why the CD-i was so horrible and sold so poorly. And the move to Philips is why the CD addon for the SNES never materialized. All that effort into creating SNES addon and a new system, and it all went down the drain.
Had Philips dominated, I think the apparent faux pas of Nintendo’s announcement would have been forgotten. But Sony went in, and showed that they really were the better company with the better control.
And then it didn’t help that Philips still got the rights to release Nintendo properties on their system that wasn’t really built for games, making them look even worse than they probably really were. They probably could have built a CD drive for the SNES that worked.
Then, of course, Nintendo decides that they won’t even use discs at all for their next console, and that caused that console to do much more poorly compared to Sony’s PlayStation.
Sure, there is an argument that Sony was screwing over Nintendo with their deal, and it was better for Nintendo to pull back. And it’s not like Nintendo broke any laws or broke their contract. It’s even possible that Sony knew about Nintendo possibly going with Philips and thought they could steamroll them by making the announcement.
But the appearance was that Nintendo had betrayed Sony, and that this is what caused the failure of all their disc-based plans.
Nintendo did screw over Sony in a very public way. The fact that Sony was a bigger company isn’t really material.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence of that, though I would be interested to see a cite to the contrary. Here’s an article from the time. Sony came out of CES looking pretty foolish - I can’t see them making that announcement if they suspected this was coming.
I’ve never really heard Nintendo described as “bullies” or Sony described as a “helpless victim,” let alone 30 years later. The best way to characterize it is this: Nintendo didn’t like the terms of their deal, told Sony to fuck right off in a very public and very embarrassing way, and gamers everywhere have been better off for it.
If anyone got bullied by Nintendo back in the day, it was third party developers.
My possibility isn’t that they expected it was coming so much as they knew Nintendo had been in talks, and hoped to put public pressure on Nintendo with them.
And, even then, I don’t think this is likely. It was just my attempt to come up with a hypothetical where Sony were entirely in the wrong, and how that wouldn’t matter due to public perceptions.
I actually see it as Nintendo being mad that Sony announced something when they hadn’t yet agreed on a certain part of the deal, and Nintendo trying to get back at them, both for the announcement and for what they thought was Sony trying to find a way screw Nintendo over. And Nintendo didn’t realize how it would make them look bad.