Was the Nintendo 64 intentionally hard to developer for or was it just Nintendo coping?

You could do some actual research, since I don't think a dead gay board about old vidya isn't going to give you a decent answer

Maybe slightly intentional in that Nintendo wanted their console to have the best 3D titles, and therefore chose an architecture that they thought would facilitate that, aware that there would be challenges and growing pains. But I think they underestimated how difficult it would be for developers, and they could have done a lot more to help them, and of course with the GameCube they moved away from SGI MIPS to PowerPC and ATi. The PS2 is also SGI MIPS and is also hard to develop for, and previously with the PS1 Sony gave developers all the help they could, I assume they did the same with the PS2.

>>11847491 (OP)
If it was easier to develop for, there'd be more games for it, no?

Nintendo was just arrogant because of their former success and believed devs would flock to it no matter how hard they make it for the devs

>>11847491 (OP)
Are you retarded?

>>11847491 (OP)
They used the SGI Onyx supercomputer and Rambus's proprietary RDRAM as the basis for the N64's hardware. The amount of game developers that even knew these things existed was miniscule, of course it's going to be hard for them to develop games in short order.
Just to illustrate the issue, Rareware was really good at using the N64 hardware because they adopted the SGI workstation years ago. They mainly used it for 3D rendering, but it still meant that they had a huge advantage over other developers who were going in practically blind, including Nintendo themselves. That's why Miyamoto was making statements like "we made Mario and Zelda with only 10% of the N64's power".

>>11848767
N64 dev can be done on much cheaper SGI Indys (sure, they were expensive to the consumer, but 10 grand for a decent setup probably isn't too bad for a professional dev).
Also, generally if you were doing 3D game dev, you probably have an SGI regardless of target platform.

>The amount of game developers that even knew these things existed was miniscule
Holy zoomer, a lot of media mentioned SGI back then and shit when it came to movies and game dev and shit. Chances are, if you were serious into professional game dev (or even fucking graphics design), you knew of SGI workstations.

>>11848767
>Rareware was really good at using the N64 hardware because they adopted the SGI workstation years ago.
that's nonsense. rare was barely good. no better than anyone else.
>but it still meant that they had a huge advantage over other developers who were going in practically blind
3d software existed for pc and amiga. nobody was going in "blind". some people had many years of experience dealing with 3d graphics. i'm not sure what kind of tainted heroin you're injecting but you need to stop.
> "we made Mario and Zelda with only 10% of the N64's power".
and as we discovered when people decompiled mario, nintendo's programmers and quality control had no fucking idea what they were doing. and no, the story of "inexperience" with c is fucking nonsense. they were just incompetent and lazy. imagine how much better zelda and mario would have been when it was released not programmed by fucking idiots? would have been sweet. instead we have miyamoto spewing up bullshit.

Nintendo had a near-monopoly on the home console market between NES and SNES, but then they got mixed up with Sony. When their deal to develop a Nintendo Playstation went south, and Sony announced they'd be developing their own console, they panicked. Here, you had a huge corporation with 100x more money, marketing influence, and some of Nintendo's own trade secrets brought back to their home base, and they're now offering a console with CD capability (a technology they owned the rights to) that gave devs greater freedom while also drastically reducing production cost compared to cartridges -- and mind you, the cost of said cartridge production was often unloaded onto devs/publishers. On top of that, Sony had extremely lenient demands in terms of rights and royalties compared to Nintendo, meaning that developing for the Playstation was an easy way for devs to escape the Nintendo ecosystem and keep more profits from both development and production. To make matters worse, Sony rushed the PS to market and had a foothold for almost two years before Nintendo's next console. As soon as devs realized what was going on, Nintendo started bleeding talent and industry presence.

What were they to do? They couldn't produce a CD-based console without giving money to their direct competitor, and they couldn't produce optical drives as cheaply as Sony who could mass produce them in-house even if they had gone with the CD format. Their third party support was in shambles and they had lost several of their critical third party IPs, not least of which was FF. So, their approach was to stick with high development and licensing costs, but to position the N64 as a product of quality compared to Sony's quantity.

1/2

>>11851283
2/2

They assembled a "dream team" of second and third party devs such as Rare, Midway and id. They enforced strict quality control measures, and purposely refused to share hardware documentation with any devs other than dream team members to filter out low quality games. They were banking on people seeing stuff like DOOM 64 and Banjo-Kazooie and saying, "Boy, the PS has a lot of games, but nothing as good as this stuff!". This was somewhat true: you can pick a random N64 game out of a bin and it will probably be of a significantly higher quality than bobbing for one of the PS's 2000 apples. The problem was, regardless of the ratio of good-bad, the PS had great games, too, and they had more marketing money driving them, making a pick and choose scenario largely irrelevant. The console was also cheaper to develop for. It was cheaper for the consumer to own and buy games for. It had multimedia features. It offered a wider range of genres appealing to multiple age and gender demographics. It offered just about everything that Nintendo didn't to devs and consumers alike, and Nintendo's approach of "well, our console has no loading times, it's built like a tank, and you'll really, really like the 12 games worth playing" just wasn't enough to sway the average persom. Ironically, the N64's biggest selling point -- built in 4-player capability -- probably just hurt them further because the kids om the culdesac just ended up sharing the same console and handful of games at sleepovers, with little incentive to buy their own unit for all of those amazing RPGs it had (/s).

The answer to your question is, "both". They were coping, and they coped by intentionally making the console difficult to work with in hopes of providing games of such a high quality that the competition's offerings wouldn't matter. Unfortunately, this didn't work out so well, and they ended up making the same mistake again with the Gamecube to an even greater fault.