Nintendo's very interesting because they make crazy money off software. What they really nailed, which will come as a shock to many game developers, is making good games. Refining the gameplay, passing on the knowledge to future games, and just generally being f****** good at their art. But it's taken them 40+ years to get here.
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They are capitalising on decades of the Art, for real. Not just a business of making games, but an art, driven by talent and not metrics and business plans.
The industry always consisted of a wide range of titles, some flops, some runaway successes, but always little predictability and the publishers operated around those intrinsic parameters. Try stuff, see what takes, make a sequel or three.
I wonder the choice of executives has changed and so changed the business mindsets? Publishers in the earliest days were gamers or otherwise often interested. At some point they became Harvard Suits just pushing economics. Is that true? Maybe also some decent gamer types felt pressured into becoming Suits by investor economics?