A double backstab: Sony and Nintendo's love-hate relationship

You absolutely must do it!

Ken Kutaragi firmly believed this.

Even though he had been betrayed by Nintendo, his former white moonlight.

This commitment remains unchanged.

These words, once spoken, actually made him relax completely.

My previously tense nerves suddenly relaxed at that moment.

"Sony can't just sell hardware, President. Content has always been our weakness."

As a consumer electronics giant, Sony is not invincible in every field.

Sony needed this game console as part of a completely new strategy that spanned the entire 1990s.

Looking to the future, hardware will become increasingly worthless; content will be the real source of profit.

Ken Kutaragi continued.

Look at the products Sony has; they're practically invincible. The Walkman, with hundreds of millions of units sold, has reached the point where almost everyone owns one.

Trinitron televisions are unparalleled in the field of color reproduction, truly unmatched.

Besides Philips, there is no other company in the world with the capability to cover the entire upstream and downstream supply chain of CD-ROMs.

Cameras, video cameras, broadcasting equipment, image sensors, audio equipment...

Almost every product line is unparalleled in the world.

But that's not enough.

Sony's rivals are a group of equally formidable behemoths.

Panasonic, Sharp, NEC, Toshiba...

They are rapidly closing those seemingly insurmountable technological gaps at a speed visible to the naked eye.

As time goes on, the technological gap between the two sides will only narrow.

In the end, they will inevitably be dragged into the quagmire of a price war.

For consumer electronics companies, this is a slow form of suicide. Ken Kutaragi could see this clearly, and everyone else present understood it even better.

Especially Norio Ohga, the president of the company, who is an artist by profession and not from a zaibatsu background.

The acquisition of Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records was also driven by this consideration.

You can only make a profit from selling a CD player, which is essentially the cost of the hardware itself.

But as long as you have plenty of best-selling records, you can keep selling them for decades.

The typical razor model is also a favorite among game developers.

Now, we have music, and we have movies.

Only games...

Sony has always lacked an opportunity to enter the market.

Nintendo would have been a perfect ticket.

But now everything is different.

"In my opinion, video games are different from traditional forms of entertainment, different from music and movies." Ken Kutaragi paused.

He noticed that the entire upper management seemed to be watching him.

Especially Norio Ohga.

Recalling his question, Ken Kutaragi felt reassured.

The boss is on my side.

However, he couldn't openly challenge them or come forward to support him; he still needed to set a good example as the company president.

But that's enough.

"Video games can seamlessly connect Sony's existing content offerings, integrating them into a completely new whole."

This is what Sony has always lacked.

A game can directly use Sony's film and television IPs, and can directly use its own OST album soundtracks.

And games can also give back to these fields.

With the platform's expansion, Sony could even truly master a completely new platform that surpasses the Walkman—a multimedia platform, not just for music.

"If you buy our game console, you can also buy our TV, our stereo system, and our records."

This is an ecological connector.

It is the core component of this build.

From content to hardware, and then to the creation of IP.

If Sony can successfully develop this game console, it can connect all its businesses into a unified whole and also gain the ability to actively produce content.

Everyone present agreed on this point.

Because there are readily available success stories right in front of them.

Pokémon

Starting with games, it has spread to hardware sales, the offline physical economy, animation, movies, toys, derivative IPs, music...

Each link in the chain feeds back into the others.

The popularity of toys will in turn boost Pokémon sales. The success of Pokémon will, in turn, drive hardware sales.

"But what if we fail? Nintendo and Sega are watching us domestically, and Gamenova is competing overseas. What will we do if we fail?"

Despite the opposition's agreement with his statement.

However, the PlayStation is still a high-risk, problematic project riddled with pitfalls.

Sony has already suffered a minor setback due to Nintendo's betrayal.

If we continue to increase investment, as sunk costs gradually increase, it will become more than just a matter of serious damage.

More importantly, the 3do case has proven that the "multimedia platform" approach is likely a dead end.

While the future depicted by Ken Kutaragi is beautiful, it remains a fantasy with no concrete reality yet.

"3do failed because it misjudged its own position. We will not repeat their mistakes and follow their old path. Games are the foundation of everything."

Unlike Trip, unlike Panasonic.

Ken Kutaragi has one important quality compared to other engineers.

He's a true gamer and knows exactly what players want. "We will succeed, and we definitely will, because we won't lack excellent games."

He said.

Nintendo betrays Sony?

It's still uncertain who stabbed whom.

The people have long suffered from the royalty system.

Countless excellent third-party developers have suffered greatly under Nintendo's oppressive power.

And what Sony has no shortage of is money.

"We want to get third parties to voluntarily join PlayStation."

Ken Kutaragi offered his own solution.

Now that things have come to this, regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, he has no room for retreat.

If he fails, then all that awaits him is Tokyo Bay.

... Let's not even talk about how frantically Sony is trying to come up with a solution.

Gamenova, located on the other side of the ocean, has also received the news.

"Lin! Good news! Satoshi reported that the cooperation negotiations between Sony and Nintendo have completely fallen apart. Hilarious! They really did just sit there and waited for them to self-destruct."

Sam hung up the phone with a chuckle and said to Lin Lixin beside him.

"Do you really think so?"

Lin Lixin rolled his eyes at him speechlessly.

"If you ask me, it's actually a good thing for us that they maintain their cooperative relationship."

Sony and Nintendo are simply incompatible.

The two parties' business philosophies and strategies are completely in conflict.

Sony prefers a more open platform environment, somewhat like Microsoft.

Nintendo, on the other hand, follows the pure Apple model, tending towards vertical integration, a closed ecosystem, and the pursuit of the strongest possible control.

Nintendo's success is inseparable from this model. This was during a time when the Atari Shock swept through the gaming industry, and the entire market began to lose faith in video games.

The introduction of royalties effectively dragged the rampant proliferation of games back to an environment where quality reigns supreme, and also caused a flood of money to flow into Nintendo's hands.

But it's 1991 now.

Times have changed.

"Sam, with Nintendo holding Sony back, they won't be able to make much of a splash."

Lin Lixin explained,

"But now that Sony is completely free, given Sony current insatiable thirst for content, they will absolutely not give up the gaming market."

It's hard to say how much energy a fully unleashed consumer electronics giant and industrial design giant can unleash.

The countdown to the birth of PlayStation officially began from this moment.

This is also what Lin Lixin has been worried about.

This is also the reason why he has been frantically making money to upgrade his wafer fab during this period.

To challenge Gamenova's current dominance, 3do, with its bunch of incompetent fools, has absolutely no chance. Lin Lixin has never taken them seriously.

Even the Atari Americas Leopard, which was already in the works, was just another machine destined to fail.

To be honest, he didn't even need to come up with any specific countermeasures for them.

All you really need to do is focus on making the game, and they'll just die there when you're not looking.

But Sony is different.

Like Gamenova, it possesses both Japan- style industrial design foundation and America- style hardware foundation.

At the same time, it is a global giant with vast assets and a large number of excellent engineers.

3do has already helped them avoid the most dangerous pitfalls.

Nintendo and Gamenova have already set a good example for them.

What Sony needs to do is follow the path paved by predecessors, and take advantage of everyone's inattention to sprint ahead and surpass them.

If it's Gamenova from the beginning of the year...

Lin Lixin might actually be having a bit of a headache about this. But right now...

He has already completed all the preliminary planning work.

"No rush, let's play along with him."

There's plenty of time in the future.

As for what happens next?

Now that he's back at headquarters, he naturally intends to do something big.

Although I had a lot of fun working on the two projects at Activision and Lucas, they were ultimately small-scale projects.

Occasionally, I still want to create some spectacle to practice my skills.

With current hardware, what level of performance is actually possible under extreme conditions?

Lin Lixin was genuinely curious.

The process improvements brought about by the new wafer fab are enough to bring Novaradeon's specifications to a new level.

Before it can be used on consoles, it naturally needs to be sent to Gamenova's classic hardware testing platform, as usual. "This project is for arcades, a first-person 3D action game."

This will be a purely technically impressive piece.

There was no need for formal project approval or deliberation; Lin Lixin was already able to determine its tone.

In terms of commercialization ability, it absolutely cannot compare to those works that are designed to make money.

But it's sure to be dazzling.

It's so dazzling that it would make every player and everyone in the world stop and stare.

At the same time, it is also a valuable game IP in the hands of EA, which is currently in a state of near collapse.

An IP that has been shelved by EA DICE Studio for many years.

I walked out of the office.

Lin Lixin strolled over to the planning board and wrote down the title of this project.

Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge. The grandfather of first-person 3D parkour games.