Curmudgeon Gamer

17 April 2007

Gates: No strategy for a console (in 1996)

While I'm recovering use of my thumb, I've been doing some reading. I ran across this fun bit in a Next Generation interview with Bill Gates from June 1996.

We don't have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing, and our business model isn't to charge software developers money. So if you compare a Nintendo game, where you've got to have that big ROM that's very expensive and pay a royalty, versus a CD-ROM on the PC, where there's a zero royalty, it's quite different.

Just over a decade later and:

Microsoft has released two consoles, one of which essentially was a Windows PC.
Microsoft charges to develop for and publish on those consoles.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. I'm just noting how quickly things changed when Microsoft realized just how much money could be made doing those two things. Quite fitting, then, that earlier in the same interview we find this exchange:

NG: So are the games Microsoft is developing primarily designed to showcase Windows 95?

Bill: No, it's to make money.

Labels: history, interviews, microsoft, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 22:42

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