They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.

Additionally video games can be a major time investment. Disney doesn't worry about the older Star Wars movies cannibalizing interest in the new ones because you can match the original trilogy in a single evening, were beating a single game could potentially take months. The quality of the entire Zelda series on average is extremely high and the majority of the games are still worth playing, a young gamer could easily start going through the library and find themselves having enough fun to just keep focusing on that instead of purchase the latest and greatest at top dollar.

I blame the widespread adoption of digital communications. What's the saying? A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull its pants up?

We should have kept the internet for nerds only. The day we introduced e-commerce to the internet, we killed it.

Eternal September indeed.

https://youtu.be/2w0U_evVEd4

https://youtu.be/A5YdD1pYzes + https://youtu.be/0cpjhIS6ClI

The NES didn't have software lockout in Japan. Most third-party Famicom[0] games were manufactured and sold by their publishers, with little or no control from Nintendo. Nintendo's way to wrestle back control over their platform was the Famicom Disk System, a disk drive add-on that was intended to work around the NES's 32k ROM limit (and associated costs of ROM) with cheaper disks that could hold up to 64k of loadable data per side.

The key was that the FDS had two lockout features that Famicom cartridges didn't:

- FDS disks had an imprint of the Nintendo logo at the bottom that meshed with plates in the disk drive. If your disk did not say Nintendo on it, it would not mount in the drive and the game would not play.

- FDS disks were rewritable, and Nintendo planned to sell games at special vending machines that would write you a fresh disk. If you weren't selling your game through Nintendo, your game wouldn't be on these vending machines.

So if you wanted your game on FDS, you needed to sign a distribution agreement with Nintendo. I'm told the terms were rather draconian. Most developers just... put larger ROMs and better enhancement chips on their third-party Famicom cartridges. This continued until someone figured out how to copy FDS games using just the RAM adapter carts and Nintendo gave up on the FDS concept entirely.

To be clear, Nintendo did have software lockout in the US, and you did have to license your game to Nintendo and have them sell copies of it using their hardware. This caused a lot of problems for NES releases of Famicom games that had custom chips in them (e.g. Contra). But even then, these were not perpetual licenses.

A perpetuality requirement would have killed any and all licensed games stone dead. If you're making a movie tie-in cash grab game on NES, you don't want to have to license that movie in perpetuity just because Nintendo demands a perpetual sublicense for a game with an expected shelf-life of about a year. Hell, not even Nintendo licensed Mike Tyson for Punch-Out perpetually.

[0] "Famicom" is just "Nintendo" in Japanese!

I think that would have been unlikely to occur to Nintendo's lawyers, since in the NES era, publishers required the developer's co-operation to provide masters targeting any additional platforms. This was before intergenerational emulation and internet distribution became widespread, and Nintendo would have had a sunset date for NES title sales.

In the early days of television, many broadcasters were prohibited by contract to retain any copies of the performance, because no value was seen in reusing them, and there's no other reason to give them any rights. Also see shows like WKRP in Cincinnati where music was only licensed for the slim purpose of the original broadcast (and perhaps direct repeats in syndication), but for release on home video, the music used did not support that use, so it had to be replaced.

Even if Nintendo wanted to use existing emulators, they wouldn't touch a GPL project like Dolphin anyway. They do use open source libraries in their games but never, ever GPL ones for fairly obvious reasons.