HappySqurriel said:
I think it would be difficult to demonstrate that Nintendo cares any less about quality than the competition does, or any more about money, but as a company they do have to consider how they will survive ... People are often critical about Nintendo because they have sold more than 100 Million units of hardware in the past few years, but they never consider the reality Nintendo was facing when they were designing these systems. Back in 2003, 2004 and 2005 (when the planning for the Nintendo DS and Wii was mostly being done) Nintendo was looking at how the Gameboy Advance underperformed compared to previous Gameboys, the Gamecube was a failure in terms of sales, Sony was releasing a "Highly Anticipated" handheld which could cut into Nintendo's strongest market, and Nintendo was facing competition in the home console market that seemed to have unlimited money to lose. In order for Nintendo to survive as a hardware manufacturer they had to deal with reality, and that meant that they couldn't afford to spend a lot of money on R&D, they couldn't lose a lot of money up front selling hardware at a loss, and they couldn't afford to have software development costs skyrocket. |
How exactly did the GBA "underperform"?? It sold more than any individual GB handheld before it in history. (And please don't start with the 118 million over one and a half decades over several handhelds crap...They don't count as a system but as systemS)
The PS1 and PS2 sold over 100 million units each, heck they are the number one and two most successfull consoles of all time yet their software and graphics quality was comparable to their competitors.
