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Soundwave said:
greenmedic88 said:
5 years of hard support is more or less what a company needs to provide to consumers to maintain goodwill when it comes to game consoles.

While the Wii U is never going to be a huge commercial success, it should bring some confidence to current owners and potential buyers that Nintendo won't resort to simply abandoning the platform.

2017 falls right in line with reasonable expectations and support.


Except that's really a load of crock honestly. 

The DS is Nintendo's most successful platform ever, and it came after cutting off the GBA after 3 1/2 years, and that was a faaaaaaaar more successful platform than the Wii U could ever dream of being. 

The XBox 360 is Microsoft's most successful console venture to date and that came after cutting off the XBox after 4 years. 

Even the Wii, Nintendo's most successful console came really after they basically abandoned the GameCube and left it for dead for most of 2005 and pretty much all of 2006. Mario Party 7 was their big holiday GameCube game for 2005, lol. They bailed out on that system, lets be honest.

Saying Nintendo supported the GameCube for a full 5 years is like saying a couple that was married for 5 years, but only lived together for maybe 3 1/2 of those years had a nice 5 year marriage. Only on paper. 

3 years is actually probably the minimum amount of support people want for a platform. Sega really screwed this because they released Sega CD in 1992, 32X in November 1994, and Saturn in April/May 1995. No one would've complained if the 32X got 3 years of support. 

Actually, the Gameboy Advance, the Gamecube and the Xbox all had far more than 5 years support. Neither the DS, X360 or Wii 'cut off' their predecessors at launch.

Gamecube 2001/2002 - 2007

GBA 2001 - 2006/7/8 (depending on region)

XBox 2001 - 2007/8.

A console is supported until it is discontinued, regardless of how many games are being released for it. Their successors might already have been released, but they were still being produced and sold and games were still available.

That the DS, X360 and Wii came in slightly earlier in their predecessor's lifecycles makes me think how much belief the companies had in their new products, because all went on to be a phenomenal success.