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[GuitarAtomik]

Microsoft not supporting Blu-ray with the Xbox 360

I think it was actually in their favor. Blu Ray was slow to be adopted and consumers ended up choosing streaming options (ie Netflix) as the real successor to home video. Not having the drive also kept the price way lower than the PS3.

Microsoft betting on the HD DVD instead of Blu-Ray, while not the worst mistake, certainly proved to be the wrong decision.

Releasing an external add on drive is hardly betting on HD-DVD. It's more like they bet against Blu Ray being important any time soon which, like I said, was a good choice for that system in the end.

 

[Sayers]

Thinking that homogenizing every game into a COD clone automatically equals COD level of sales. Amazingly, it's a mistake just about every company has made multiple times and one they continue to make.

 

[Valkrai]

Nintendo: Virtual Boy, Wii (because it destroyed the already low third party support and cemented its kiddy reputation)
Sony: PS3 launch price, Vita
Microsoft: Initial Xbox One announcement, Rare acquisition
Sega: Genesis Addons (32X, CD), Saturn.
Valve: lowering the floodgates of Steam quality control.
THQ: uDraw Tablet, low quality licensed title.
Capcom: Practically anything with DLC, killing Megaman, alienating the RE fanbase.
Square Enix: Focusing on mobile

 

[Paracelsus]

"Next, we went to [Sega president] Nakayama and the Board at Sega, and they basically turned me down. They said, 'that’s a stupid idea, Sony doesn’t know how to make hardware. They don’t know how to make software either. Why would we want to do this?' That is what caused the division between Sega and Sony and caused Sony to become our competitor and launch its own hardware platform."

Can you really top this one?

 

[casnix]

Nintendo not going with Sony.
Nintendo sticking with cartridges.
Sega CD & 32X.
Sony going with Cell.

 

[Squatch4299]

The marketing of the Wii U first of all. People had no idea what it was and thought it was an extension of the original Wii. Add to that the fact that it isn't "next gen" and came out too early and you have a big mistake.

Also, starting off the Xbox One with all of those horrible policies and such. I understand that that is all long since changed but they started out the console war by digging their own grave to save Sony the trouble.

 

[sugarman]

skyrim and battlefield 4 launch

 

[old]

The Spirits Within - sunk Square, forced to sell to Enix, slow drip of delayed releases ever since. Never truly recovered.

PS3 - horrible price, horrible launch marketing, weak lineup. Sunk Kutaragi. Blew their massive lead and spent years battling for third. Took years to eventually recover under Kaz.

Xbox 360 letting Peter Moore leave - lost its identity and direction, lost gamers, lost momentum. 360 stagnated and decayed while PS3 caught and surpassed. Never recovered.

Xbox One reveal and E3 conference - massive clusterfuck of bad decisions, spent more time on tv and sports than on games, DRM, pissed on gamers and consumers, forced Kinect. Won no favor with gamers, E3 had poor communications with gamers. Spent the next year undoing all of their mistakes and clarifying their statements.

Wii U - flop. The game has changed and nobody told Nintendo.

 

[Cheesemeister]

Region-locking leaves money on the table and frustrates customers.

 

[z1ggy]

Day one DLC.

 

[-MD-]

Announcing the Resident Evil series exclusively for Gamecube.
Way to hit your loyal fans in the face.

The best game in the entire series came out of that deal, how mad can you really be?

 

[Winterfang]

The Spirits Within - sunk Square, forced to sell to Enix, slow drip of delayed releases ever since. Never truly recovered.

PS3 - horrible price, horrible launch marketing, weak lineup. Sunk Kutaragi. Blew their massive lead and spent years battling for third. Took years to eventually recover under Kaz.

Xbox 360 letting Peter Moore leave - lost its identity and direction, lost gamers, lost momentum. 360 stagnated and decayed while PS3 caught and surpassed. Never recovered.

Xbox One reveal and E3 conference - massive clusterfuck of bad decisions, spent more time on tv and sports than on games, DRM, pissed on gamers and consumers, forced Kinect. Won no favor with gamers, E3 had poor communications with gamers. Spent the next year undoing all of their mistakes and clarifying their statements.

Wii U - flop. The game has changed and nobody told Nintendo.

Isn't the Xbox 360 consistently selling great since it's inception? I don't think it had even one bad year.

 

[Dark-VIII]

Nintendo going with the cartridge format for N64.

This
they lost a great supporter such as Squeresoft coz of it back then

 

[ArtHands]

People always seem to bring this up, without mentioning this part:

You know that's how people rewrite history, by conveniently leaving out some facts which shape the whole story.

 

[AmanoBuff]

If they actually went through with it, Xbone Always Online DRM.

Nintendo abandoning the hardcore market since the Wii

Nintedo dropping support for Nintendo CD.

Done and done.

On the bolded: To their defense, they didn't know the mobile market will explode the way it did and that it would grab most of those casual customers with it.

 

[Crazy_Sunshine]

Isn't the Xbox 360 consistently selling great since it's inception? I don't think it had even one bad year.

But they never really made a profit because of the Red Ring of Death.

OH!! Red Ring of Death!! Has to be one of the worst mistake of all time.

 

[terrisus]

You know that's how people rewrite history, by conveniently leaving out some facts which shape the whole story.

And it seems to practically be the accepted history at this point too.

Since, as in this thread, you'll get a pile of people saying that, with just a couple people interjecting with "But..." and going mostly ignored by the people who had posited it.

 

[clav]

PS3: 599 US DOLLARS

 

[gigantor21]

2004? Try 1995

Seriously. The WiiU simply reflects the nadir of a trend that started when they decided to double down on cartridges while the rest of the industry moved to optical disks. Nintendo themselves don't seem to know what to do with the system or who it's supposed to be for.

 

[Laconic]

Activision.

.

 

[old]

Isn't the Xbox 360 consistently selling great since it's inception? I don't think it had even one bad year.

I was more referring to games. Somewhere around 2009-2010 the PS3 got its shit together and started releasing great games. That was the turning point. All the momentum Peter Moore built up fizzled while his successors focused on Kinect.

 

[Yagharek]

Nintendo not going with Sony.
Nintendo sticking with cartridges.
Sega CD & 32X.
Sony going with Cell.

Nintendo would have been worse off going with Sony as they would have sacrificed rights to their own software in the contract.

A Nintendo PlayStation would have been a big mistake.

 

[Gully State]

Microsoft turning their back on PC gaming. They were in position to be what Steam is now in the PC space.

 

[nautical_j]

THQ - Udraw, bankrupted the company

 

[Saganator]

FFXIII.

And for the sake of adding something new to the list, APB. Massive flop killed the studio Realtime Worlds. Put David Jones, creator of Lemmings, GTA, and Crackdown to making Facebook games.

 

[Parfait]

Capcom

 

[Laconic]

Capcom

Capcom was once glorious.

Activison on the other hand...

 

[Drkirby]

But they never really made a profit because of the Red Ring of Death.

OH!! Red Ring of Death!! Has to be one of the worst mistake of all time.

See, the Red ring was both good and bad. On the one hand, they got a really bad rep for a while, and had to fix/replace a ton of hardware. But rushing to market really did help them get a foothold in the Western Market it likely wouldn't have got if it launched after holiday 2005.

Capcom was once glorious.

Activison on the other hand...

The first 3rd party game company. I may not like their recent business moves, but I don't own stock.

 

[Serdley]

Announcing the Resident Evil series exclusively for Gamecube.
Way to hit your loyal fans in the face.

Yeah, this. I still think that move killed the franchise in a way.

Also Silent Hill HD Collection and how Konami handle the situation.

 

[unempLLOYD]

599 us dollars

 

[Laconic]

See, the Red ring was both good and bad. On the one hand, they got a really bad rep for a while, and had to fix/replace a ton of hardware. But rushing to market really did help them get a foothold in the Western Market it likely wouldn't have got if it launched after holiday 2005.



The first 3rd party game company. I may not like their recent business moves, but I don't own stock.

I won't buy it on principle.

 

[El_Chino]

Xbox One pre-launch debacle.
PS3's launch price & CELL
Nintendo Wii U in general is all types of wrong

 

[Piano]

Yeah, this. I still think that move killed the franchise in a way.

By leading directly to two of the franchise's best games?

 

[AcademicSaucer]

Nintendo abandoning the hardcore market since the Wii

thats not a mistake, the "hardcore market" doesnt want what nintendo makes, getting away from that market was the right choice, at the end,nintendo will finally make the right call and go full mobile.

 

[KentBrockman]

Saturn launch plan.

This right here. I don't think anything can really top this. They couldn't recover from this and it basically set into motion the events that would lead to Sega's eventual exit from the hardware market. As a result the game industry now is much worse than it would have been.

 

[SwiftDeath]

thats not a mistake, the "hardcore market" doesnt want what nintendo makes, getting away from that market was the right choice, at the end,nintendo will finally make the right call and go full mobile.

You never go full mobile

 

[EatinOlives]

We all know that Nintendo rejecting Sony CD-ROM Drive kinda mistakes but lets get specific?

I'd actually go a little more general than that and suggest Nintendo's handling of that entire SNES CD. Everything they did about that add-on was a shit parade. The "betrayalton" of Sony that led to the birth of the entire Playstation brand is the obvious one, but there's also their eventual scrapping of the project. So they burned bridges with Sony to go with Philips, then they burned bridges with them, and also agreed to let Philips release Hotel Mario and the godawful Zelda games, after years of Nintendo being extremely anal about keeping their reputation of unwavering high quality. Dropping SNES CD also forced many titles to be canceled or get severely downsized, like Secret of Mana (its original vision sounded so much better than what we ended up getting), and at the end of the day the damn thing wasn't even released.

So in short, the whole debacle:
-Singlehandedly created their best/worst competitor
-Spawned a second awful console
-Directly led to the creation of some of the worst games of all time to use Nintendo IPs
-Eviscerated the original vision of many games in development
-Screwed over two companies
-Wasn't even released.

Nice going, Nintendo. Couldn't have possibly gone any worse.

 

[Renekton]

I feel like once-off mistakes are almost forgivable if the company learned from them. I'd probably say that Nintendo's general strategy since about 2004 has been its biggest ongoing mistake and they may only now be learning significant lessons from it. The huge success of the Wii seems to have caused them to be even more insular and ignorant of industry wide trends, and when the WiiU hit with their take on a HD console it really showed.

We may need to have a balanced view. For example, the DS line and Wii were resounding successes for their time. It's unfair to paint a picture of complete utter incompetence when their track record is actually mixed rather than consistently abysmal.

 

[AnAngryPillock]

Sony E3 2006: Riiiiiiiiidge Racer Giant enemy crab $600 US Dollars

 

[kasane]

Sony E3 2006: Riiiiiiiiidge Racer Giant enemy crab $600 US Dollars

not really the worst since they caught up with it

 

[Booshka]

Sony E3 2006: Riiiiiiiiidge Racer Giant enemy crab $600 US Dollars

Revolutionary gameplay features, such as, hit the weak spot for massive damage.

 

[Yagharek]

I'd actually go a little more general than that and suggest Nintendo's handling of that entire SNES CD. Everything they did about that add-on was a shit parade. The "betrayalton" of Sony that led to the birth of the entire Playstation brand is the obvious one, but there's also their eventual scrapping of the project. So they burned bridges with Sony to go with Philips, then they burned bridges with them, and also agreed to let Philips release Hotel Mario and the godawful Zelda games, after years of Nintendo being extremely anal about keeping their reputation of unwavering high quality. Dropping SNES CD also forced many titles to be canceled or get severely downsized, like Secret of Mana (its original vision sounded so much better than what we ended up getting), and at the end of the day the damn thing wasn't even released.

So in short, the whole debacle:
-Singlehandedly created their best/worst competitor
-Spawned a second awful console
-Directly led to the creation of some of the worst games of all time to use Nintendo IPs
-Eviscerated the original vision of many games in development
-Screwed over two companies
-Wasn't even released.

Nice going, Nintendo. Couldn't have possibly gone any worse.

Revisionist history all up in this post.

They didn't screw over Sony. If they had kept to the original contracts, they would have screwed over themselves.

 

[maltrain]

WiiU
* Terrible name
* Terrible gamepad
* Terrible advertising
* Terrible launch games list
* And a terrible choice being underpowered again

 

[The Broken Ska Record]

Daikatana?

Oh, and SURPRISE! SEGA SATURN OUT NOW!

 

[scytheavatar]

IMHO the fall of Bioware. They had everything with ME2 and DA:O, then they piss it all away in a span of 2 years.

 

[DangerMouse]

Sony: PS3 launch price and allowing MS a full year headstart.

MS: Would have been RROD, if they actually had truly paid for it like they deserved for doing that purposefully. Xbox One pre-launch disaster.

Japanese devs: Accepting Microsoft money hats for JRPGs both damaging and delaying pickup of the PS3 where their games would have sold far better (as later proven with late ports despite the loss of launch hype still outselling year earlier versions in mere days even with a smaller userbase than it would have had had they backed it in the first place) and damaging their own companies just for short term benefits. S-E for example basically killed two franchises in Last Remnant, hilariously still on PS3 wish lists in Japan, good job S-E, and Star Ocean disappearing. Namco was one of the few to learn from their mistake and ended up in one of the stronger positions as their games including Tales had a rather large comeback.

Thinking that homogenizing every game into a COD clone automatically equals COD level of sales. Amazingly, it's a mistake just about every company has made multiple times and one they continue to make.

Totally agree.

Sony not cutting Vita's price when the 3DS announced its first price cut that paved the way to its renaissance, combined with not securing a MonHun exclusivity deal in Japan. And proprietary memory cards pretty much cemented its failure. The handheld is a complete, enormous mistake

Nintendo wasting two years with the WiiU. I believe the tablet took most of their development time while putting games like Mario Kart 8 and 3DW on the backburner. Planning and marketing-wise, it has been a disaster

Sega's incredibly long list of poor decisions following the Megadrive. Not even Trip Hawkins would concoct such a number of consecutive failures

Yeah, they really should have reacted to that price cut before the Vita came out. Also, perhaps even more importantly, will never understand how they failed to pay whatever it took to secure MonHun for Vita.

 

[CassidyIzABeast]

Abandoning the "AA" game market
Adopting modern hollywood's summer movie model

 

[ArtHands]

I'd actually go a little more general than that and suggest Nintendo's handling of that entire SNES CD. Everything they did about that add-on was a shit parade. The "betrayalton" of Sony that led to the birth of the entire Playstation brand is the obvious one, but there's also their eventual scrapping of the project. So they burned bridges with Sony to go with Philips, then they burned bridges with them, and also agreed to let Philips release Hotel Mario and the godawful Zelda games, after years of Nintendo being extremely anal about keeping their reputation of unwavering high quality. Dropping SNES CD also forced many titles to be canceled or get severely downsized, like Secret of Mana (its original vision sounded so much better than what we ended up getting), and at the end of the day the damn thing wasn't even released.

So in short, the whole debacle:
-Singlehandedly created their best/worst competitor
-Spawned a second awful console
-Directly led to the creation of some of the worst games of all time to use Nintendo IPs
-Eviscerated the original vision of many games in development
-Screwed over two companies
-Wasn't even released.

Nice going, Nintendo. Couldn't have possibly gone any worse.

wow, lets not try to revise the history now. Nintendo will have already died back then if they went along with Sony with that original contract, which gives sony much more control over the revenue from the console.

 

[Crazy_Sunshine]

Abandoning the "AA" game market
Adopting modern hollywood's summer movie model

I don't know man. There has been a lot of indies that sprang from the ground because of this move.

 

[esterk]

Love Sony, but that PSN hack was a total shitstorm.