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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I wish nintendo or any other hardware company would release a well-made console, without the game licensing stuff.

The nintendo DS was such a success, and it did not have fast hardware.

Even if it's a little expensive and not fast, being able to run free games and software would really be an awesome feature. People say there's no money in it, but hardware is fast and cheap today, so any slow device would be cheap to make.

The raspberry pi is really awesome, but I don't understand why they're not making the final step of releasing a full device. Of course there are many projects out there, but they're not produced in high quantities, meaning not cheap, not well marketed, not always well designed, and often require non-trivial additional tweaking.

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Its because Nintendo isnt really a hardware company - they're a software company. Game console hardware is generally sold close to at cost (sometimes even at a loss), and profit is made by charging royalties to game developers.

The primary reason to lock down consoles is to prevent piracy, but also to lock in those royalties. If the console was open, presumably most 3rd parties would take advantage of that to reduce costs.

IIRC, so take this with a grain of salt, the big N is the only major console developer to consistently sell consoles at a profit.

I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Playdate: https://play.date/

I don't get why they don't support 3rd party games, only the (very!) few games they publish themselves.

The OpenPandora / Pyra Handheld consoles represent what you describe .. and there is a budding ecosystem around the scene.

I think the problem with these projects is that there isn't really a rigorous, solid systems-software approach to building the base platform for other developers. There used to be an art to designing operating systems and environments/frameworks for others - but this subject has been well and truly usurped by the marketing executives who want to exploit the devs rather than make them successful.

Ehhh. The OpenPandora has been out of production since 2013, and the Pyra has been in development hell since 2014. The ecosystem surrounding these devices is not in a healthy state, in large part because there aren't a lot of them left.

There's also a risk-to-brand incentive for these console companies to control who gets to publish what games. If you make a console and then the games for your console suffer from quality control issues or are otherwise inconsistent with your branding, people associate that with your console as well and don't buy your (in their perception, even if not objectively) crappy console.

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