For anyone interested, the history of the original PlayStation is pretty interesting (all the different collaborations Sony was attempting with Nintendo and Sega before going it alone - mostly getting rejected by Nintendo and Sega).
https://mdshock.com/2019/03/18/sega-and-sony-new-insight-int...
That article also gives insight into why Kutaragi/Sony wanted to partner with Nintendo.
A quote by Kutaragi:
“I wanted to start up a business that would become a new major income source for the company in the future… [Sony executives] thought it would take too long to start a new business from scratch with venture capital. So the only way to initiate change was from the outside. We could join forces with the best-performing company in the field. We would sell them our technology, establish a track record, and use that as the springboard to future success. That was my reasoning.”
Also, from historian Reiji Asakura:
“Nintendo was concerned that its business would eventually be taken over by Sony if Sony continued to drive product development. Although Nintendo was dominant in the game-machine market, the company was fully aware that Sony had a superior research-and-development operation and thus had the potential to outstrip its competitors in the area of technological advancement.”
References are in the linked article.
In reality it seems like it was Sony's intention all along to use this as a stepping stone to competing with Nintendo directly anyway.
Also, the contract between Nintendo and Sony was signed in 1989, and Sony would have received all royalties from CD-ROM sales. This was at a time when it was still not clear that CD-ROMs would soon dominate the market. However, that had changed by 1991 when the Nintendo Play Station was revealed.
Then-president of Sony, Norio Ohga, said the following in his autobiography: “What we learned later was that Yamauchi’s son-in-law, then the head of Nintendo’s U.S. operations, had apparently nixed the deal. The son-in-law, Minoru Arakawa, had witnessed firsthand the stunning growth in U.S. sales of CD-ROM drives and disks. Arakawa knew that Sony had built a strong position in CD-ROM products. And he apparently feared that Sony would get the better of Nintendo in a collaboration.”
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-Generat...
The gaming industry saw the birth of companies like nvidia, and now GPUs are tools.
It may be old news to a lot of people, but that blew my mind. I don't see how that is acceptable. I guess that hardware for these consoles is still a struggle.
Nintendo's the only one that's really gone a different direction; the Switch is ARM-based and built around the Nvidia Tegra X1 (same chipset as the Nvidia Shield). Software-wise, they're (reportedly) running a derivative of the OS from the Nintendo 3DS.