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Comment by henriquez | Hacker News Reader

Right, Valve is privately owned so they are free to be fiscally irresponsible, but they aren’t. Burning bridges with Nintendo is just bad business.

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I know it's semantics, But I dont think 'financially irresponsible' is the right semantics to use the context.

Gaben could put a video out tomorrow of him burning piles of Nintendo merchandise and swearing that Steam will never do business with Nintendo and both Gaben and Valve would be fine.

It's hard to conceive of how much money an entity like Valve has and how fast it continues to accumulate.

Steve Jobs was notorious for shit listing companies like AMD or Nvidia and it doesn't seem to have been detrimental to Apple whatsoever.

> Steve Jobs was notorious for shit listing companies like AMD or Nvidia and it doesn't seem to have been detrimental to Apple whatsoever.

The difference is that Apple has alteratives to AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Whereas the Nintendo products are unique.

Give me a single reason why nintendo would even begin to consider partnering with valve.

Nintendo is famous for its closed and closely controlled ecosystem.

Partnering with apple to release a mobile game is a bad (outlier) example as nintendo has no capabilities to release their own phone.

Why would Nintendo invite/open competition with steam deck? Why would they make it easier to pirate their games and give steam cut on the sales via steam store. All the while nintendo has their own console their own store.

Its like apple allowed android store on iOS. Sure they could do it but why would they?

You could have asked this question about Sega in the 90s. Why would Sega ever consider partnering with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony?? And then the Dreamcast tanked and they pivoted to software only. Other platforms were there for them to port all their games. If Sega had done something more boneheaded than "Sega does what Nintendon't" then Nintendo could have told them to pound sand and they wouldn't have a successful platform on which to save their business.

Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely. The Switch is doing great, the successor will probably do great. But then again, so did the Sega Genesis. There's no need to burn bridges.

As a counter argument in one sentence you say

> Will Nintendo suffer the same fate? Highly unlikely.

In next you suggest not to discount something "Highly unlikely".

That's basically a Pascal Wager territory.

Building closed off ecosystem is Nintendo's whole business, you making business decisions based on idea Nintendo might upend their whole business is... wasteful?

The odds are low, but we're kinda skirting the real question here: What does Valve have to gain by allowing an emulator on the store anyway? It's free so no platform cut, it's open source so it's unlikely to ever be monetizable, and it's legally dubious on top of all that. If this was some billion dollar piece of software like COD I'm sure Valve would fall on the sword like Sony did. But there's literally nothing to gain here except headaches.

Thats a fair point.

One could argue that making easy to install Dolphin is an incentive to sell steam deck. So people can play switch games without having switch

Nintendo historically has enormous leverage on multiple Japanese publishers and developers.

Speaking for previous experience in the music industry, It wasn't uncommon for some A&R or label to become "persona non grata" for personal or "political" (rocking the boat too much with some untouchable manager or artist) reasons and getting the boot from most if not all big publishers and distributors.

I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was going on in the gaming industry.

Nintendo had released their games on other platforms in the past. On other consoles and on PC. They do what they deem good for business.

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