Anonymous
10/4/2025, 8:27:35 AM
No.12073270
>>12073241
>But because they made the better business decisions nobody talks about them.
Sort of. Nintendo's biggest and most enduring win was forcing Western execs to march in lockstep when it came to handhelds. For whatever retarded reason, Western execs, on average, tended to despise handhelds, so every handheld not made by Nintendo (and not called PSP) underperformed.
They did have their duds. I can't imagine what Howard Lincoln felt when presented with the Virtual Boy shit sandwich, or what Reggie Fils-Aime felt when presented with the equally large shit sandwich that was Wii U. Admittedly, they certainly were better at softening blows to their bottom line.
>Once more, it's executives being ignorant. Not malicious.
But it is. SoJ execs were relentlessly bullied by Nakayama (remember that high-school-tier bullying was extremely commonplace in Japanese companies at the time) for their low performance between 1991 and 1993 (see picrel for how dire it was in Japan compared to ROW), and, once Western sales started faltering, they went "aha, now's the time to show baka gaijin buta who's really the boss here". Japanese businesspeople were routinely very petty in the 80s and 90s, and ultimately needed a two-decade-long recession to beat that out of them.
That's not to say SoA made no bad calls. Concentrating on FMVs for the Sega CD was the big one (on a fundamental level, FMVs were [intended to be] the Western equivalent of [or response to] anime cutscenes but, with a handful exceptions, they failed in implementation), supporting too many platforms was another (Sega Pico was pointless in the West, because learning an alphabet language is ultimately far easier than learning one based on 3 different pictogram types, and SMS/GG should've been wound down circa late 1993), shovelware-ing the Genesis catalog to inflate it was yet another, and going for the 32X and Nomad were more bad calls.
>But because they made the better business decisions nobody talks about them.
Sort of. Nintendo's biggest and most enduring win was forcing Western execs to march in lockstep when it came to handhelds. For whatever retarded reason, Western execs, on average, tended to despise handhelds, so every handheld not made by Nintendo (and not called PSP) underperformed.
They did have their duds. I can't imagine what Howard Lincoln felt when presented with the Virtual Boy shit sandwich, or what Reggie Fils-Aime felt when presented with the equally large shit sandwich that was Wii U. Admittedly, they certainly were better at softening blows to their bottom line.
>Once more, it's executives being ignorant. Not malicious.
But it is. SoJ execs were relentlessly bullied by Nakayama (remember that high-school-tier bullying was extremely commonplace in Japanese companies at the time) for their low performance between 1991 and 1993 (see picrel for how dire it was in Japan compared to ROW), and, once Western sales started faltering, they went "aha, now's the time to show baka gaijin buta who's really the boss here". Japanese businesspeople were routinely very petty in the 80s and 90s, and ultimately needed a two-decade-long recession to beat that out of them.
That's not to say SoA made no bad calls. Concentrating on FMVs for the Sega CD was the big one (on a fundamental level, FMVs were [intended to be] the Western equivalent of [or response to] anime cutscenes but, with a handful exceptions, they failed in implementation), supporting too many platforms was another (Sega Pico was pointless in the West, because learning an alphabet language is ultimately far easier than learning one based on 3 different pictogram types, and SMS/GG should've been wound down circa late 1993), shovelware-ing the Genesis catalog to inflate it was yet another, and going for the 32X and Nomad were more bad calls.