From: hunter@oakhill.sps.mot.com (Hunter Scales)
Subject: Re: Time to boycott Photo CDd
Organization: Motorola Inc., Austin, Texas
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 15:13:19 GMT

ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes:

>> Look at what happened with Nintendo.  Nintendo successfully sued people
>> who decoded the cartridge interface so they could make and sell their own
>> Nintendo-compatible games.  The result is that the price of Nintendo
>> games is _much_ higher than it would be if there was legal competition.

>On the other hand, it is not clear that there would be *ANY* games now
>if Nintendo had been open.  Remember the early '80s?  Video games were
>everywhere.  You almost couldn't walk more than a block without running
>into an arcade.  Atari and Mattel had thriving home game systems.  Activision
>and Imagic provided quality thrid party games for the Atari and Mattel
>machines.
	Actually, Activision designed some of the *best* games for
	the Atari, actually adding value to the system.

>The home game makers were working on really cool systems (e.g., Mattel
>was likely to have a 68000 based system with bitblt hardware and high
>resolution graphics by 1983 or 1984 -- I was working at the company that
>was designing this).

	Yeah, me too. 

>But by 1983, most of the arcades were gone.  Mattel was out of the market.
>I don't remember if Atari was still making the VCS or not.  Most of the game
>makers were out of business.

	If you know why the bottom fell out of the video game market
	and cam predict same in the future, I would like to offer you
	a job :-).
	Seriously, I dont believe that the market crashed because there
	was a wide variety of products.

>A few years later, Nintendo comes along, and recreates the home video game
>industry.  I read an article somewhere about how they did this.  It said
>that before entering the market, they analyzed the collapse of the previous
>market.  They decided that the cause of the collapse was too many low
>quality games from fly-by-night game companies.  They determined that the

	Hmm, so what they said is: "There were so many companies in the
	market and some of them made shoddy merchandise so consumers said
	'we dont know what is good so I guess we wont buy anything, we
	never like video games that much anyway'.  Therefore, if we 
	reenter the market and stamp all our games "Approved for NES"
	then the consumers will have the interest in home video games
	re-awakened"
	By that logic, people should have stopped buying personal computers
	until IBM entered the market and produced its *officially stamped*
	Personal Computer which if had protected by patents so that
	no one could copy it and produce possibly inferior clones
	thus causing confusion to reign in the market.  Yeah.

>home video game market could only thrive if game quality was high.  Hence,
>they had to make sure that no fly-by-night companies could come in and
>start making bad games.

	What Nintendo did, and they were well within their legal rights,
	is to use the patent as a weapon to prevent the *use* of their
	system (not the duplication of it).  They built a hardware
	device whose sole purpose is to disallow the use of any 
	ROM cartridge that does not contain one, patented it and 
	the consumer gets to pay for it.  Because of that device,
	the consumer must pay around $40 for a game instead of $20
	and the difference goes to Nintendo.  Again, to be absolutely
	clear, this is perfectly legal (an ethical by today's standards)
	I just choose not the support it by buying their products.
	I also happen to believe that, had they not followed this
	strategy, the Ninentedo system would be even bigger than
	it is and be even more profitable.

>--Tim Smith
-- 
Motorola Semiconductor Inc.             Hunter Scales
Austin, Texas                           hunter@prometheus.sps.mot.com
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