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[ccbfan]

I think it was mostly base on Nintendo being a dick to square during the nes and snes era. With Sony finally being an out from the Nintendo.

I think it all started when square wanted to release ff2 and ff3 to foreign markets and nintendo basically said no.

Then Square wanted to bring ff5 to western markets but Nintendo said no westerners were to stupid to play complex rpgs so we got FFMQ instead.

Then Nintendo told Square they were gonna make a snes cd and to make secret of mana into a cd game. Nintendo scraped the cd.

Then Nintendo would not allow Square to use on of the larger snes carts even though they allowed enix to.

Then Nintendo basically tried to steal all of Square's work on SMRPG and would let Square publish it in Western markets.

Then Nintendo did not give Square advance n64 dev kits basically telling square they're not prized as a 3rd party.

Then Nintendo decided to switch from cd and back to cartss

Then Sony went to square and gave them tons of benefits.

Square accepted Sony's offers and tried to convince other third parties to follow them.

Hence the hate between the two.

Nintendo was pretty much the biggest jerk anyone have ever seen during the nes and snes days. The problem was that they had such a monopoly in Japan that the third parties needed them. That's why everyone was more than glad to leave when given another sensible options.

 

[WickedCobra03]

Nintendo and Square were just money laundering fronts for the yakuza.

Correction... "Nintendo and Sqaure ARE just money laundering fronts for the yakuza". Where do you think that the "it prints money" catch phrase came from?

 

[fernoca]

Many people saying Yamauchi..when quite a few interviews mentioned the fact that when Square left Nintendo, Yamauchi just wished them "good luck"..then the Square high-ups started bad mouthing Nintendo at any interview they could.

I'll try to dig some link...

 

[Haunted]

Wow, some of you are seriously ill-informed.

I wouldn't even call it revisionist since that implies having knowledge of actual events and misrepresenting them. Some of you just have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

Stump has it right.

 

[PusherT]

Man all this revisionist history is making me hungry. I wonder what's for lunch

What the hell dude the true revisionist history or let me rephrase that "Illusion" is the one by 3rd parties that Nintendo was this villan and dictatorship company. Yes there is some truth there but this sounds like sour grapes. We all have the 3rd parties or "Square" take on the events but we never hear the other side you know Nintendo's side. That one poster nail it it seems Square was upset they weren't part of Nintendo's inner circle and wanted more $$ from Nintendo like Nintendo were giving companies like Enix and Konami. Nintendo being of a position of power has no reason to make comment on these accusations.

 

[EmCeeGramr]

What the hell dude the true revisionist history or let me rephrase that "Illusion" is the one by 3rd parties that Nintendo was this villan and dictatorship company. Yes there is some truth there but this sounds like sour grapes. We all have the 3rd parties or "Square" take on the events but we never hear the other side you know Nintendo's side. That one poster nail it it seems Square was upset they weren't part of Nintendo's inner circle and wanted more $$ from Nintendo like Nintendo were giving companies like Enix and Konami. Nintendo being of a position of power has no reason to make comment on these accusations.

Uh... yeah!

 

[Effect]

Many people saying Yamauchi..when quite a few interviews mentioned the fact that when Square left Nintendo, Yamauchi just wished them "good luck"..then the Square high-ups started bad mouthing Nintendo at any interview they could.

I'll try to dig some link...

I remember reading that as well. While a lot might have gone on behind the scenes Nintendo never bad mouthed Square in public but Square however did and joined right in with Sony when they did it. I remember there being a Final Fantasy commercial or was it a poster that did this as well. Also like someone else said it wasn't really Square leaving that got to Nintendo but them getting others like Enix to leave as well that was the real big thing. There might be various versions of this story but this has always been the constant aspect I think.

 

[Davidion]

Nintendo wanted to make systems that tanked their industry leadership and Square Enix wanted to follow up the best iteration in their legendary RPG series with a flaming animu jizz turdfest. Those ideals didn't match so they fought and the N64 and FFVI were born.

 

[onipex]

Maybe we should go back to that three game a year rule but expand it to all system. That would stop a LOT of crap from flooding the market. The crash before the NES is most likely the very reason they did this too.

This is the reason. Even with that in place there was still plenty of crappy games coming out.

 

[PusherT]

Many people saying Yamauchi..when quite a few interviews mentioned the fact that when Square left Nintendo, Yamauchi just wished them "good luck"..then the Square high-ups started bad mouthing Nintendo at any interview they could.

I'll try to dig some link...

For real !! This goes back to my point all this history seem all come from the 3rd parties were is Nintendo side. If what you wrote is true that is terrible, Nintendo is a victem of there own success it seem. It reeks of jelousy imo.

 

[Amir0x]

What the hell dude the true revisionist history or let me rephrase that "Illusion" is the one by 3rd parties that Nintendo was this villan and dictatorship company. Yes there is some truth there but this sounds like sour grapes. We all have the 3rd parties or "Square" take on the events but we never hear the other side you know Nintendo's side. That one poster nail it it seems Square was upset they weren't part of Nintendo's inner circle and wanted more $$ from Nintendo like Nintendo were giving companies like Enix and Konami. Nintendo being of a position of power has no reason to make comment on these accusations.

holy fuck

The reality is Nintendo was one of the worst companies since the industry began in terms of fostering positive relationships with third party developers. They had absurd restrictions, obscene royalties, and in the case of Squaresoft specifically participated in a wide range of shitty actions that allowed Sony to come in and scoop them up with their more consumer-friendly emerging technology.

I'm not even sure I should be responding to you seriously, but there is a real reason third parties worried about Nintendo's return to rule. They were fucking insane when they were the most powerful kid on the block. And they were bad for gamers to boot.

Things have changed and Nintendo is much more reasonable now, but to try to say third parties were somehow in the wrong during the 90s and late 80s is... hilarious. Dumb. Retarded. And also embarrassing for you.

 

[EmCeeGramr]

For real !! This goes back to my point all this history seem all come from the 3rd parties were is Nintendo side. If what you wrote is true that is terrible, Nintendo is a victem of there own success it seem. It reeks of jelousy imo.

poor nintendo. a victem of jelous thrid-parties

 

[apotema]

Nintendo made a shitty hardware decision. Square made a good business decision. Hiroshi Yamauchi is a cold motherfucker who gave his own father the figurative finger on his deathbed.

Please elaborate on this

 

[fernoca]

For real !! This goes back to my point all this history seem all come from the 3rd parties were is Nintendo side. If what you wrote is true that is terrible, Nintendo is a victem of there own success it seem. It reeks of jelousy imo.

Well, let's not take it out of proportion.
As another poster said, Nintendo never said anything "in public"..who knows what they said in meetings and closed doors...

Nintendo was well known, to be basically..an asshole as a company back then..

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

And it seems odd to highlight only Square's leaving when almost every developer choose the PS1 over the N64 for obvious reasons.

Sure PS1 was the popular choice over N64, but for a publisher to have nothing for any of Nintendo's home or portable systems for a period of 7 years was pretty rare. How many publishers had such a bad relationship that they were forced into WonderSwan portable exclusivity?

Cartridges were a huge problem, regardless of load times, and the introduction of CDs was a massive benefit to consumers that resulted in huge increases in game sales. The industry really opened up after that point.

Yeah. It was definitely possible to get acceptable results from cartridges, but for all the advantages of CD brought to everyone in development, publishing, distribution, and home use, increased load time was definitely an acceptable trade. But don't let 1998-era JoshuaJSlone know I said that.

 

[EmCeeGramr]

Please elaborate on this

Yamauchi and his family had a pretty antagonistic relationship stemming from the fact his father left him and his mother when he was very young. Apparently his father, near the end of his life, came to see Yamauchi and his family but Yamauchi didn't want to talk to him. His father died shortly thereafter of a stroke.

 

[Deku]

This period in history was never really covered adequately. All most people have to go by were public statements, hazy memory of media reports , and hearsay.

I think the posts already post sufficiently captures the reasons. Mainly Square was unhappy, a disagreement over direction, restrictive publishing, high royalties, Sony's offers and money.

I would also like to add. Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2 was initially planned as a Play Station add-on title, hence the amazing opening which was cut down to a single digitized frame on the SFC iteration. Some reports I've read indicated that Sony was courting Square as far back as 1993, behind Nintendo's back.

This sort of fits into the whole saga of Nintendo dropping Play Station, reported by David Sheff as a defensive move because Nintendo felt Sony was planning to pull the carpet from under them after the SFC era was over and turn Nintendo into a virtual subsidiary dependent on Sony hardware.

In a way Sony did do it with the PlayStation but Nintendo retained their independence by scuttling their relationship with Sony.

 

[PusherT]

So are Nintendo and SE all buddie buddie now or they just trying to make it work now (DQ 9/10)? It seems Nintendo is close with some japanese publishers, Hudson being a major player who seems tight with Nintendo. Iwata seems cool and Wada at SE seems alright so I think there realtionship may be on the up and up.

 

[Mandoric]

How many publishers had such a bad relationship that they were forced into WonderSwan portable exclusivity?

This was multi-region too, wasn't it? SunSoft, not Square, published the late-90s US reissue of Square's Game Boy games.

 

[Sadist]

PusherT receiving tag in three... two...

 

[onipex]

holy fuck

The reality is Nintendo was one of the worst companies since the industry began in terms of fostering positive relationships with third party developers. They had absurd restrictions, obscene royalties, and in the case of Squaresoft specifically participated in a wide range of shitty actions that allowed Sony to come in and scoop them up with their more consumer-friendly emerging technology.

I'm not even sure I should be responding to you seriously, but there is a real reason third parties worried about Nintendo's return to rule. They were fucking insane when they were the most powerful kid on the block. And they were bad for gamers to boot.

Things have changed and Nintendo is much more reasonable now, but to try to say third parties were somehow in the wrong during the 90s and late 80s is... hilarious. Dumb. Retarded. And also embarrassing for you.

Nintendo biggest mistake back then was not relaxing their restrictions and lowering their fees over time. The restrictions were put in place to stop the market from becoming flooded with crappy software and crashing again. It is not like third parties were not making money back then they were just limited by Nintendo.

Who knows if the market would not have crashed again without some of those restrictions. What we do know is that the industry was kept alive long enough for competitors to enter the market. Nintendo went too far ,but it is not like third parties would have nurtured the industry instead of milking like they did before.

Things have changed but the market still gets flooded with tons of bad games. The difference today is the Internet and media sites that help lead people to the software they like.

 

[Tiktaalik]

N64 used cartridges instead of CDs.

Even earlier than that Square was designing Secret of Mana for the SNES CD, but then Nintendo scrapped the device and Square had to cut down Secret of Mana like crazy to get it to fit on a cart.

That probably cut into the Square's profits a lot and likely pissed them off.

 

[Kobun Heat]

Wow. Lots of crazy up in this thread.

First of all, here's that snippet of a Nikkei article that people mentioned -- it was originally translated on Gifford's old site Video-Senki, which is dead now:

"Our true enemy," he admitted, "was our pride" -- pride that resulted from the heady years of the original PlayStation. When Square originally announced back in 1997 that the Final Fantasy series would be PS exclusive from now on, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi treated the affront lightly, saying that the console selection "couldn't be helped". Suzuki responded by publically bashing the N64 and convincing Enix to join the PS camp along with them, which, looking back at it now, he realizes wasn't an incredibly smart move. The little grudge match between them that resulted was the main reason Square failed in their bid for a Nintendo license earlier this year. Without Square, though, the PlayStation platform wouldn't be half as interesting to a whole slew of gamers, and so the well-publicized buyout of last week occurred.

Losing Dragon Quest to the PlayStation was a bigger blow than Final Fantasy, but you never heard anything about the great "Nintendo/Enix fallout" because it never happened; Enix maintained a good relationship with Nintendo, created games for Game Boy and a couple N64 titles, and thus never had to go crawling back with public apologies like the one above.

After falling on his sword, Suzuki did secure a Nintendo license -- for the last year of Square's existence, I mean, because it merged with Enix months after it released its first Nintendo game.

 

[grandjedi6]

Many people saying Yamauchi..when quite a few interviews mentioned the fact that when Square left Nintendo, Yamauchi just wished them "good luck"..then the Square high-ups started bad mouthing Nintendo at any interview they could.

I'll try to dig some link...

I remember reading that as well. While a lot might have gone on behind the scenes Nintendo never bad mouthed Square in public but Square however did and joined right in with Sony when they did it. I remember there being a Final Fantasy commercial or was it a poster that did this as well. Also like someone else said it wasn't really Square leaving that got to Nintendo but them getting others like Enix to leave as well that was the real big thing. There might be various versions of this story but this has always been the constant aspect I think.

You guys are so delusional:

"[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games," he noted in a 1999 interview. Yamauchi - who incidentally has prided himself on the fact that he has never played a videogame - went on to call RPGs as a whole both "silly and boring."​

"There is no truth to an agreement between Nintendo and Square," said Yamauchi. "[Square] is free to say what they want, but there are no plans for a contract, and the chances that there will be one in the future are low." ​

In 2001, after Square expressed interest in working on future Nintendo platforms, Yamauchi told Bloomberg Japan that Nintendo would not allow that to happen. "There is no contract with Square, and that matter is not open to further discussion," Yamauchi told the financial news service. "[Square] can say whatever they want, but we have no intention of signing a contract, and there's little chance of one being signed in the future."​

"We're not expecting to be accepted by Nintendo right away, but we're doing everything to get the relationship positive again. The most important thing about management is the ability of having several choices. It is hard to loose one of these. We have to try to convince Nintendo, by showing them our plans for GBA and GameCube that we will boost their hardware sales" said Mr. Suzuki, Square's president.​

 

[gerg]

"We're not expecting to be accepted by Nintendo right away, but we're doing everything to get the relationship positive again. The most important thing about management is the ability of having several choices. It is hard to loose one of these. We have to try to convince Nintendo, by showing them our plans for GBA and GameCube that we will boost their hardware sales" said Mr. Suzuki, Square's president.​

Please please please tell me that's a typo.

 

[Deku]

Thanks Kobun.

That does put the meat into what was said earlier.

 

[Deku]

dp

 

[Combichristoffersen]

Nintendo scraped the cd.

So it was Nintendo who ruined my copy of Number of the Beast? Those fuckers..

 

[Vilix]

You guys are so delusional:

"[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games," he noted in a 1999 interview. Yamauchi - who incidentally has prided himself on the fact that he has never played a videogame - went on to call RPGs as a whole both "silly and boring."​

"There is no truth to an agreement between Nintendo and Square," said Yamauchi. "[Square] is free to say what they want, but there are no plans for a contract, and the chances that there will be one in the future are low." ​

In 2001, after Square expressed interest in working on future Nintendo platforms, Yamauchi told Bloomberg Japan that Nintendo would not allow that to happen. "There is no contract with Square, and that matter is not open to further discussion," Yamauchi told the financial news service. "[Square] can say whatever they want, but we have no intention of signing a contract, and there's little chance of one being signed in the future."​

"We're not expecting to be accepted by Nintendo right away, but we're doing everything to get the relationship positive again. The most important thing about management is the ability of having several choices. It is hard to loose one of these. We have to try to convince Nintendo, by showing them our plans for GBA and GameCube that we will boost their hardware sales" said Mr. Suzuki, Square's president.​

And now with DQXI out for the DS and DQX coming to the Wii their relationship has just about come full circle. ^.^

 

[Effect]

That's not Nintendo bad mouthing or attacking Square. That's them talking about business decisions and well holding a grudge.

 

[Night_Trekker]

"[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games," he noted in a 1999 interview. Yamauchi - who incidentally has prided himself on the fact that he has never played a videogame - went on to call RPGs as a whole both "silly and boring."​

This never fails to make me laugh out loud :lol

 

[grandjedi6]

That's not Nintendo bad mouthing or attacking Square. That's them talking about business decisions and well holding a grudge.

delusion: a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact

 

[PhoenixDark]

okay, STOP THAT.

Im so sick of stupid people hating on cartridges. Oh no, no CD-quality music and shitty non-interactive cutscenes. What a loss. Instead we got no load times.

I LOVED carttridges and at some point they will make a return. Because the only thing holding them off today is their high cost compared to disc-based media. It´s not because the medium is somehow faulty...it´s the opposite.

in short: cartridges ftw

:lol

You can't be serious in 2009.

 

[fernoca]

You guys are so delusional

Kobun already posted the link of what i said..heck I thought I was delusional, since I couldn't find the link; but he did.. ...:lol

 

[Regulus Tera]

I think it was mostly base on Nintendo being a dick to square during the nes and snes era. With Sony finally being an out from the Nintendo.

I think it all started when square wanted to release ff2 and ff3 to foreign markets and nintendo basically said no.

Then Square wanted to bring ff5 to western markets but Nintendo said no westerners were to stupid to play complex rpgs so we got FFMQ instead.

This is the first time I've ever heard anything of the sort about Nintendo being involved in FFII, FFIII, and FFV localisation decisions.

 

[cartman414]

You guys are so delusional:

"[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games," he noted in a 1999 interview. Yamauchi - who incidentally has prided himself on the fact that he has never played a videogame - went on to call RPGs as a whole both "silly and boring."​

"There is no truth to an agreement between Nintendo and Square," said Yamauchi. "[Square] is free to say what they want, but there are no plans for a contract, and the chances that there will be one in the future are low." ​

In 2001, after Square expressed interest in working on future Nintendo platforms, Yamauchi told Bloomberg Japan that Nintendo would not allow that to happen. "There is no contract with Square, and that matter is not open to further discussion," Yamauchi told the financial news service. "[Square] can say whatever they want, but we have no intention of signing a contract, and there's little chance of one being signed in the future."​

"We're not expecting to be accepted by Nintendo right away, but we're doing everything to get the relationship positive again. The most important thing about management is the ability of having several choices. It is hard to loose one of these. We have to try to convince Nintendo, by showing them our plans for GBA and GameCube that we will boost their hardware sales" said Mr. Suzuki, Square's president.​

All of which makes perfect sense in the context and aftermath of the event Kobun Heat referenced (Suzuki of Square convincing Enix to jump to PS1 to spite Nintendo). Yamauchi would nonetheless later applaud DQ7's success, making note that people like good stories, to paraphrase his words.

 

[Datschge]

Square merging with Enix was the move that happened in response to the financial troubles of both companies

Off topic since not related, but these needs correction:

- Enix bought Square. In an amicable way once they raised their offer. The buy-out was only possible due to the financial troubles Square had (leading to much lower market capitalization allowing for a relatively cheap offer), not Enix.

- Also due to the diverse PC/Z80/Motorola based systems the game system market was way more diverse in the NES/SNES age than later on in Japan. The "Nintendo dictatorship" as a monopoly people keep talking about may have been the situation in the US back then, but it was most certainly not applicable anywhere else.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

Also due to the diverse PC/Z80/Motorola based systems the game system market was way more diverse in the NES/SNES age than later on in Japan. The "Nintendo dictatorship" as a monopoly people keep talking about may have been the situation in the US back then, but it was most certainly not applicable anywhere else.

Sega Mark III software catalog
Sega Master System software catalog

The vast majority of games published on this generation of Sega hardware was by Sega itself. While there may have been more hardware on the market, Nintendo had a lock on most of the 3rd party games.

 

[jeremy1456]

As I remember, there wasn't a huge amount of bad blood made public on Square's part.

I seem to remember it still being assumed that they would still make Nintendo 64 games after announcing that they were moving FF to the Playstation.

 

[dslgunstar]

For real !! This goes back to my point all this history seem all come from the 3rd parties were is Nintendo side. If what you wrote is true that is terrible, Nintendo is a victem of there own success it seem. It reeks of jelousy imo.

:lol

Nintendo was a victim of their own ego. They assumed the third parties needed them more than the other way around. Sony made those third parties a better offer and they left, giving Nintendo a much-needed reality check. Of course, it took awhile for that reality check to actually incite action, because Yamauchi was a senile old man.

Nothing to do with jealousy. Most of the companies that sided with Sony went on to make some of the best games in their histories.

 

[Koren]

N64 kits were SGI IRIX machines, as I recall. Some of the software may have been switched to PC down the road but I definitely remember us having IRIX demo machines (although typically we just burned to cart to test, having lots of IRIX machines was expensive.)

Indys stations, if I remember correctly (maybe I'm wrong on that, I don't recall well SGI stations). But I maintain that Squaresoft wasn't one of the first to receive the kits (as opposed to Enix and a couple others), probably due to earliers troubles between Nintendo and Squaresoft (or simply Nintendo was thinking Squaresoft was important).

I think Enix left a far larger scarf, but indeed, they kept good relations with them.


But again, I'm sure the reasons Squaresoft left was not a mere problem with carts. Bad relationships, royalties problems, among others during SNES era.

 

[GDGF]

Wow, some of you are seriously ill-informed.

I wouldn't even call it revisionist since that implies having knowledge of actual events and misrepresenting them. Some of you just have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

Stump has it right.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Let the old timers handle the history. You can tell who was actually around and paying attention when all of this was going on and who wasn't even old enough to hold their joystick.

 

[Hellion]

Wow at the FFVII butt hurt in here. :lol

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

So are Nintendo and SE all buddie buddie now or they just trying to make it work now (DQ 9/10)? It seems Nintendo is close with some japanese publishers, Hudson being a major player who seems tight with Nintendo. Iwata seems cool and Wada at SE seems alright so I think there realtionship may be on the up and up.

They seem pretty buddy-buddy, but then it's not Square they need to be buddy-buddy with, but the Frankenstein Square/Quest/Taito/Enix/Eidos thing.

After falling on his sword, Suzuki did secure a Nintendo license -- for the last year of Square's existence, I mean, because it merged with Enix months after it released its first Nintendo game.

Yeah. I think the only Square-only GBA games were the Chocobo dice game (such a non-event it didn't even make a Famitsu weekly Top 30) and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

 

[Datschge]

The vast majority of games published on this generation of Sega hardware was by Sega itself. While there may have been more hardware on the market, Nintendo had a lock on most of the 3rd party games.

List of games on Sega systems? You are totally missing the point (and probably didn't read what I wrote).

Gaming systems for home use on the Japanese market during the NES/SNES age (most likely not even a complete list, leaving out Sega): MSX, MSX2, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000, NEC PC-8801/VA, NEC PC-9801/9821, Fujitsu FM Towns/FM-7/FM-77AV/Marty, PC Engine, PC-FX, Neo Geo, Pioneer LaserActive, Bandai Playdia...
Europe and other regions, while not to a similar amount, also had diverse game system markets. After the PlayStation brand got popular worldwide the diversity of gaming systems disappeared.

All you did is confirming the prevalent US bias with regard to video game history.

 

[speedpop]

Interesting to see how many people still get the reasons wrong after so many years.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

List of games on Sega systems? You are totally missing the point (and probably didn't read what I wrote).

Gaming systems for home use on the Japanese market during the NES/SNES age (most likely not even a complete list, leaving out Sega): MSX, MSX2, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000, NEC PC-8801/VA, NEC PC-9801/9821, Fujitsu FM Towns/FM-7/FM-77AV/Marty, PC Engine, PC-FX, Neo Geo, Pioneer LaserActive, Bandai Playdia...
Europe and other regions, while not to a similar amount, also had diverse game system markets. After the PlayStation brand got popular worldwide the diversity of gaming systems disappeared.

All you did is confirming the prevalent US bias with regard to video game history.

No, your post is beside the point. The monopoly that people talk about (NES exclusivity contracts and the like) has always been about software. The number of consoles/PCs on the market is irrelevant as far as that's concerned. If you wanted to be on the NES, you often weren't permitted to play ball elsewhere.

EDIT: This post sounds more dismissive than I intended. Not really saying that you're wrong. Just that it's a different issue.

 

[stuminus3]

Something about how Mr Potato Head Man couldn't drive a tractor. It was a serious business.

 

[RamzaIsCool]

This was hardly a Square-only thing right? Allmost all the 3rd party developers bailed on Nintendo the first chance they got. And it has taken Nintendo 10 years, with the release of the I-sell-3.8-fuckin-million-units-a-month behemoth a.k.a. the Wii to restor..... wait a minute scratch that.... 3rd party developers still don't give a crap. :lol

Anyway to make a long story short Nintendo platforms aren't 3rd party friendly platforms for whatever reason. And I suppose under that whole mantra it wasn't that hard for Square to ditch them when a subsitute came sailing a long in the form of the Playstation. CD drive didn't hurt either.

 

[Mandoric]

No, your post is beside the point. The monopoly that people talk about (NES exclusivity contracts and the like) has always been about software. The number of consoles/PCs on the market is irrelevant as far as that's concerned. If you wanted to be on the NES, you often weren't permitted to play ball elsewhere.

The point he's trying to make is that that NES development was far more locked down than FC development. For example, there was no actual lockout of unlicenced soft. In fact, several major publishers made their own FC cassettes in a manner similar to EA Genesis games.
The late-mover disadvantage on the SFC, with the PCE series already established, also forced a little bit of flexibility.
However, you're correct that Nintendo's huge market lead, tighter control over the SFC, and sole ability to dangle the carrot of international sales (until the MD) helped them drive a very hard bargain.