Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It started even before then. We'll talk about this a lot more in the next episode, but an incredible self-inflicted wound that Nintendo is part of killing their dominance, they didn't have backward compatibility at every early generation. The Super Nintendo was not backwards compatible with the NES, the N64 was not backwards compatible with the Super Nintendo, the GameCube was not backwards compatible with the N64. They completely whiffed on this really important lesson. Console R&D is actually not a scale economy because you don't have the benefit of all the people that bought your old console to amortize the cost of your new console across, because you don't know how many people are going to buy the new console. I think that's something they've woken up to with the Switch—again, foreshadowing here—to the extent where the next big console that Nintendo comes out with, is a Switch and is super Switch compatible, then they actually start entering the scale economies game, where they can make the biggest, best piece of hardware if they can get more people paying a subscription. They can port their existing user base. They first are doing it with the Wii, which not coincidentally is their big comeback, that Wii could play GameCube games. We're getting ahead of ourselves.…

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