A lot of companies are doing the same type of things.
Take- of all companies- Nintendo.
the NES contained a CIC lockout chip which required the cart board to always have a particular chip- the design of which was patented by Nintendo and as such any third-party developers not only needed to get permission from Nintendo to use the chip but Nintendo also required that the chip meet certain "standards"... unfortunately the factories who produced chips that met this standard were few, expensive, and took a long time to ship.
As an example, Tengen, a third party developer, found itself dissatisfied with Nintendo's licensing policies, which restricted the developers ability to have the game available on other platforms. So- for a while Tengen followed Nintendo's licensing terms, but all the while their engineers were working to create their own replica of the CIC lockout chip so that they could release games on their own, in an attempt to thwart the high prices required by the factories Nintendo deemed suitable as well as eliminate the time barrier from order to arrival of the chip shipment.
On December 12, 1988, armed with a knowledge of the NES security system, Atari sued Nintendo for $100 million, accusing it for practicing a monopoly in video games. They rereleased Pac-Man, R.B.I. Baseball, and Gauntlet in new rounded black cartridges, even though licensed copies were still around. The following month in January they officially broke off their agreement with Nintendo and released a string of titles in the Tengen carts. Tengen manufactured the cartridges themselves and wasn't subject to Nintendo's strict guidelines.
sound familiar?
Unfortunately they didn't think ahead on that one; Nintendo hit back hard with a countersuit for breach of contract and copyright infringement- claiming tengen copied the security chip (again, this is similar to the OS industry with the old Apple lawsuit Vs. Microsoft, although hardware based). This started a long series of court battles between the two, with Nintendo itself
forcing retailers to either remove all Tengen Products or all Nintendo merchandise. Almost every single outlet complied with this "guerilla" tactic, as Nintendo was a big name for toys/games back then, and not having Nintendo products would almost surely mean much lower profit margins.
The end result? while court battles were settled, Tengen was mortally wounded financially, dissapeared when Warner Communications merged with Time Inc to form Time-Warner. The new company consolidated the arcade and home divisions under one common name, Time-Warner Interactive, and the Tengen named ceased to exist.
And what happened to Nintendo and the lockout chip? Nothing. it remained in the NES, there was one in the SNES and also the N64, forcing developers to jump through Nintendos hoops and licensing barriers to develop games for their consoles. Admittedly, this ensured that Nintendos game library was of (generally) high quality, but at the same time does this not strike an interesting parallel with the way Microsoft has been conducting business?
