Why did Midway never enter the console market?

[diskoboy]

Think about it.... Bally (Midaway's old owners) even put out the Astrocade, but didn't use their more popular Midway brand name for it. The Midway name meant alot more than Bally, before the great crash.

Midway was Atari's only real competitor in the arcade side of things. A Midway console probably would've given Atari a real run for it's money.

So why didn't Midway (Or to a greater extent in Japan, Namco) ever put out a console of their own back in the original golden age? You think it would've been a given, at the time... Or did Bally keep them out of the market because of the failure of the Astrocade?

[Vectorman0]

I think it all has to do with the great risk involved. Look at how many consoles there were that didn't do very well. If they were making money with what they were doing, maybe they saw no reason to risk everything at a chance for increased profits.

[Clownzilla]

Well, they were doing well with their Arcade and Pinball systems. To be honest, I don't think they would of had adequate resources to enter the console market.
If they did do it though, it would of been a fun system. Also, Namco did have their hands in the Playdia system (which failed terribly). It could of done MUCH better if it were not a kids system.

[Steve W]

I remember reading something back in the day about Namco having a hand in the design process of the original PlayStation at first.

I think Midway made too much money on licensing their games out to companies for home console ports. Creating and marketing a console costs a heck of a lot of money and comes with a lot of financial risk. Having software houses license the rights to port their games to existing consoles would be much easier.