Entanglements from a Previous Life

Sega had originally taken a licensing fee of eight to ten US dollars for each cartridge, but for Electronic Arts, it lowered that to two or three US dollars.

The royalty rate was squeezed down to twenty-four percent.

Electronic Arts could even independently control a game's release timing and sales volume, completely free from Sega's review restrictions.

This contest let Electronic Arts earn massive profits during the 16-bit era, laying the foundation for its position as the overlord of third-party software.

However, in this time and space, the trajectory of history shifted after Nakayama Takuya took over Sega.

Nakayama Takuya knew the ways of North American software companies all too well.

During the research-and-development stage of the Mega Drive, he carefully reviewed the hardware architecture blueprints and directly overturned the original unprotected design plan.

He ordered the hardware engineering department to add a physical-level security lockout chip to the motherboard, even at the cost of increasing the console's manufacturing expense.

This technology, known as TMSS, became a technical barrier Electronic Arts could not cross.

Interestingly, the core logic of this seemingly unsolvable defense system was not complicated.

When a player inserted a cartridge into the console and turned on the power, the console would read a section of data at a specific address in the cartridge ROM.

Only if that data contained the characters "SEGA" would the console's video output chip be activated, and a line of white text would appear on the screen: "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD."

Only then could the game start normally.

If a third party tried to bypass this mechanism and write its own boot code, the console would cut off the video signal, lock the image, and crash to a black screen.

Even more ruthless was Nakayama Takuya's legal arrangement.