Aricle: Xbox vs Gamecube. Looking back at the battle for 2nd place.

[DarkNight_DS]

misterd said:

DarkNight_DS said:

Kyros said:
Darknight I think no one is arguing against cubes per se. Just purple ones with kiddie toy look. And the xbox was weird too. But yes third-party support was probably the biggest problem

Purple was an IN color when the cube came out. It wasn't considered kiddie. I can show you a ton of equipment I had the pleasure of working with when the cube was released and it was all purple. For some reason tech companies liked purple. I blame SGI mostly... Actually a lot of it was Purple and looked very much like the GameCube, just a few more thermal fins and blue lights. The Cube may look kiddie now, but in 2001 the design was what everyone was going after in the tech business.

In the tech business that may have been true, but Nintendo isn't pushing gear to the tech business. They're in the business of pushing consoles to the gaming market, which at the time in the US and EU (and is larely still today) males between the ages of 10-30 who saw a purple lunchpail as a reason to question one's sexual orientation. The perception then AND now remains that the GameCube was an underpowered system aimed at small children.

 

Now, if you put the color aside, I agree with everything you said. The hardware and proprietary disc format was a reason many felt Nintendo would be better able to compete last generation. Unfortunately, the color choice and other bad marketing decisions (Mario Sunshine's "Clean is better than dirty" commercial; swapping out a "realistic" Zelda for Celda) kept the Cube's numbers low. And I suspect the difficulty in pirating software may have hurt their market as well, as many markets are big on bootlegs. While this may hurt the developers, it also encourages console sales, and that's going to boost the overall market size for them.

 How about this... the Cube lacked consistant game releases.  It was also a year too late to the party.  Plus Most users felt burned by the N64's slow releases.  I never once thought the cube was kiddy before I got it, I don't remember anyone my age saying it was kiddie (I'm 30 now).  People complained about it's release dates though and that I'd say was the worst thing about the cube.  Maybe kids said it looked kiddie ;)