so far, a lot of this conversation is looking at video games in a vacuum within the walls of NEC.
Video games were a small slice of NECs holdings overall. A few factors I'm sure play into the history of the supergrafx. First off, USA was still reeling from Black Monday (1987), so releasing any pricey electronic was going to be tough in 1989, especially a marginal upgrade to an existing console. Yes Gameboy succeeded, but it was exponentially different, and $89 at launch was a friendly Christmas price to pay. But this is a small factor overall. In 1989, Japan was in the midst of their own equity/capital market crash which I am sure shifted focus for NEC. The sharp fall of the Yen, coupled with NEC losing major market share in the PC space were probably bigger factors to NEC shifting resources to it's core businesses. It took Japan almost a decade to get out of the bank crisis overall, so it's no surprise in the early 90's that NEC and Hudson offloaded most of the work to TTI which essentially was a glorified licensing deal. Frankly it was smart since a major component of the JP stock market crash was centered around real estate. It was becoming less and less profitable to utilize square footage for a business unit that wasn't producing the capital that could be made in other electronic areas. Just saying, I think many bigger factors were playing into the supergrafx fate rather than nerd pressure and cart prices.
However, Zeta almost has a point, in 1989, Japan consumers were spending at high rate because of the easy access to money. Typically, Japanese citizens were known as frugal savers. This was good for the banks. But sometime in the late 80's, this mindset shifted to more money being put into investments. To recapture revenue, banks were forced to start lending at an alarming rate. They were offering loans at 2x, 3x, 4x the value of a borrowers collateral (typically homes). Most of that money was being funneled into the capital markets by the borrowers. Stocks started to fall, and banks weren't getting paid back. This lead to home prices and real estate value to fall sharply. Sound familiar? We could have learned something about this in 2008. Problem is, most of the people involved in that cycle were already retired and record keeping wasn't what it is today.
