Interesting Quote About the GameCube's Design

Bobbery

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Bobbery on 30 June 2015

From Wikipedia:

Howard Cheng, technical director of Nintendo technology development, said the company's goal was to select a "simple RISC architecture" to help speed development of games by making it easier on software developers. IGN reported that the system was "designed from the get-go to attract third-party developers by offering more power at a cheaper price. Nintendo's design doc for the console specifies that cost is of utmost importance, followed by space."^[10] Hardware partner ArtX's Vice President Greg Buchner stated that their guiding thought on the console's hardware design was to target the developers rather than the players, and to "look into a crystal ball" and discern "what's going to allow the Miyamoto-sans of the world to develop the best games".^[7]

It's interesting that Nintendo had such a different philosophy regarding 3rd parties back then, and the GameCube did receive good 3rd party support. Do you think Nintendo should target 3rd party developers instead of consumers with their next console? And do you think Nintendo would've been better off since the GameCube era if they would've stuck to this target 3rd party developers and "offering more power at a cheaper price" design philosophy?

I think yes to both honestly. Especially since repairing 3rd party relationships will be very difficult now.

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Esiar on 30 June 2015

I agree with you. 'Nuff said.

Can't wait for The Zelder Scrolls 3: Breath of The Wild Hunt!

marley

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marley on 30 June 2015

The Gamecube received better 3rd party support than the WiiU, but I certainly wouldn't call it good.

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Ultrashroomz on 30 June 2015

Huh, neat...

"Just for comparison Uncharted 4 was 20x bigger than Splatoon 2. This shows the huge difference between Sony's first-party games and Nintendo's first-party games."

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jonathanalis on 30 June 2015

and seems that dint work.
why would work now?

ghost_of_fazz

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ghost_of_fazz on 30 June 2015

Oh honey... 3rd parties don't give a damn about ease of development. They don't even care about power.

Gourmet

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Gourmet on 30 June 2015

Even more third party developers jumped in at the launch of the wii u compared to gc. But every single of them bombed hard. So that's a non-factor really.

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d21lewis on 30 June 2015

To bad they made it look like a little girl's travel bag.

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foxtail on 01 July 2015

Shadow1980 said:

The GameCube had decent third-party support, but it fell way short of the PS2 in that regard, and even the Xbox had better third-party suport than the GC. The likely culprit? The little guy on the left here:

With less than one-third the capacity of even a single-sided single-layer DVD (1.5GB vs. 4.7GB), the GC's proprietary miniDVD format didn't do the system any favors. Now, I know there's all the "Well, they could have just split the game across multiple discs" talk, and sure, there's been plenty of multi-disc games before and after, but A) they weren't exactly common, B) some games probably couldn't get split across multiple discs as they take place in a single contiguous environment (think GTA), and C) I honestly doubt that anybody really wanted to split their games across multiple discs and usually only did so when it was necessary (even CD's 700MB capacity was not enough for many PS1 games; it was just a hell of sight better than the 64MB that the biggest N64 carts could hold, plus CDs cost a lot less to make). Not only is it extra work to split just one port up into multiple discs, but it also incurs greater expense (you're talking about an extra dollar or two per copy in manufacturing costs, which does add up). While a handful of publishers felt it was worth it for at least some titles, many major third-party games that came to PS2 and Xbox were no-shows on the GameCube, and the non-standard format is the only plausible explanation why.

The Xbox 360 had over 50 games which were multiple disc and it didn't seem to be a problem.

The X360 was an HD system stuck using DVDs while the PS3 was using high capacity Blu-rays.

Before they updated in 2011, X360 discs were locked at 6.8GB max due to a portion of the disc being reserved for security.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii was 7.4GB, that SD Wii game was bigger than a lot of single disc 360 games which were HD.

As for the Gamecube ports , the discs were a problem for larger open world games,

but most other games could be ported with multiple discs if they really wanted to.

The problem that generation was that most the better 3rd party games were payed exclusives and payed to stay off the other systems.

Also the original Xbox had some good 3rd party support, especially from the West, but it ended up doing just as poorly as the Gamecube in terms of system sales compared against the PS2.