Wow. I usually don't watch his videos nor like him but I've to say he showed me a side of him that I hadn't seen before and I'll also add that I completely agree with him. I grew up playing Nintendo and Sega but mostly Nintendo and if it wasn't due to the big N I might've not been as interested in gaming as I am now. It's disappointing that Nintendo and Reggie still don't get what they're doing wrong and this alone is pushing me from considering to purchase the NX at launch (not that I was going to anyway but I had hoped they'd know it better).
Rich tends to put his foot in his mouth every now and then, but he was more or less correct. This is exactly what I mean by saying "adequate hardware" - it has to be hardware that supports the games of its generation.
The NES didn't just win because of the shady licensing either - in many ways the hardware was cutting edge, especially compared to Atari that was stuck in the past. That, and SEGA's licensing deals were even worse.
The SNES and the MD were evenly matched and sales-wise they're really close, but either way the SNES was powerful for its time.
The N64 was in many ways more powerful than the PS1, but it had tons of design flaws that go beyond the cartridges - for instance, it had plenty of memory, but each texture was capped at 4kb. If you've ever wondered why PS1 games are nicely textured while N64 games look muddy or resort to gouraud shading, that's the reason. To make textures at least half-way decent, developers like Rare had to stack them - games like Banjo-Kazooie use multilayered textures in order to achieve the level of detail that could've been achieved on one layer on the PS1. Not only that, Nintendo also insisted on using their proprietary code for the 3D accelerator. The system rendered 3D based on a programmable accelerator which used microcode, similarly to how shader programs work today. The default code that was considered "stable" limited the amount of polygons down to 110,000 flat-shaded polygons per second, even less with textures or shading. Compared to the PS1's 360,000 flat-shaded triangles per second it was incredibly poor performance, and the only way to go beyond this limitation was to use the somewhat tempermental "Turbo" microcode which was not endorsed by Nintendo. If you're wondering why some environments in Ocarina or Majora are just flat backgrounds, the reason is that they couldn't be rendered under Nintendo's strict guidelines. The system was more powerful as far as the metal is concerned, but Nintendo kept throwing hurdles in its way. It's really bizarre once you look into the technical aspects of it all.
The NGC's failings were numerous too - it had no support for media whatsoever. The DC and the PS2 had whole web browsers AFAIR and the NGC couldn't even play a CD. Many people bought a PS2 for its DVD capabilities as well, while the NGC used tiny miniDVD's, even though Nintendo likes to pretend they were proprietary storage.
They've had their head in the clouds for a long time, they didn't go nuts overnight, all this was a long time coming.
Source: Bloomberg.com
