[QUOTE="Timstuff"]

Nintendo screwed over Panasonic with the Gamecube, too. Panasonic was licensed by Nintendo to make the Gamecube's disc drive, and part of their licensing deal was that Panasonic would be allowed to produce their own version of the Gamecube, the Q model, which could play DVD movies in progressive scan. The Q units were much sleeker and designed with a more adult audience in mind.

The big reason Nintendo lost with the Gamecube was because they didn't have DVD playback in the system and it was percieved as a child's toy, and even early on Nintendo was realizing that Panasonic's Q model had a significant edge over their own. Instead of trying to play it up to better compete with the PS2 and Xbox, however, Nintendo started to worry that the Q model would end up competing with their own Gamecube model, and believed that it could potentially put a dent in Nintendo's bottom line, even though Nintendo was collecting royalties from it. Nintendo decided to drum up some BS claims about how the system's full-sized DVD tray made it a vehicle for piracy (which was BS, since games could almost as easily be pirated for the regular Gamecube, and it was not any worse of a problem than on PS2 or Xbox), and therefore demanded that Panasonic only release very limited quantities of the Q. They also forced Panasonic to cancel their plans to release the Q outside of Japan.

The ultimate effect of this was that Panasonic was not able to release enough Q units to make a profit with the operational costs of manufacturing them, and many speculate that that's exactly what Nintendo wanted. If it had been released in the US it likely would have carried a $299 price tag like the Xbox and PS2, but because it was only avalible in limited quantities in Japan, it was very expensive to import in the US-- usually $400 or more, depending on whether or not the region was unlocked. They stopped manufacturing it altogether after about a year. Nintendo was pleased, but gamers were not. Gamecube lost the 6th generation console war, and I can't help but wonder if it would have gone differently if Nintendo had promoted the Q instead of trying to subvert it.

As you can see, Nintendo has a long and sad history of screwing over their manufacturing partners. :(