kain_kusanagi said:
archbrix said:
kain_kusanagi said:
I'm not sure if it's going to work because the Wii U is looking a lot like the next Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast was ahead of it's time and had great games. But because it hit the market early it's competitors could enter the market with more powerful machines. The Dreamcast was also all about really good first party games. Sure it had plenty of ports and 3rd party exclusives, but Sony and Microsoft hit the market with incredible 3rd party support. People skipped the Dreamcast because they were waiting for the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox. All for different reasons. People may do the same with the Wii U.
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Some key differences between WiiU and Dreamcast:
Nintendo is launching a new system after coming off of great success with its predecessor; Sega wasn't.
Nintendo's finances are doing great; Sega's weren't.
Nintendo's first party franchises are leagues more successful than Sega's.
Nintendo is specifically courting 3rd parties with blockbuster games, such as GTA. Sega was specifically missing one of the biggest 3rd party games at the time, Madden, and was in fact competing directly against it with their own pigskin offering.
Nintendo's WiiU offers a new way to play with its controller; Sega's Dreamcast didn't.
Nintendo's system is backward compatible; Sega's wasn't.
And Nintendo doesn't have a clear-cut market leading competitor waiting in the wings to inevitably eclipse it like Sega did with Playstation 2.
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Y
"Nintendo's first party franchises are leagues more successful than Sega's."
Nintendo fans love Nintendo games no more than Sega fans did leading up to Dreamcast. Die hard fans aren't the problem, it's getting everyone else to jump on board that's difficult. I happen to be a Nintendo fan and I'm still a Sega fan just like I was leading up to the Dreamcast. I thought the Dreamcast was going to kill the competition, but my eyes where blinded by my fandom. I'm seeing much of the same coming from the Wii U that I failed to see in the spectacular Dreamcast.
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The difference is that Nintendo franchises are mostly at the height of their influence, or at least in a good place (Metroid, Zelda, and StarFox have somewhat fallen from grace, but there's nothing to say they can't come back), whereas Sonic, for instance, had gone for an entire generation without a proper new game by the time Adventure rolled around in 1999. Even taking up the idea that Sonic was a *real* rival for 2D Mario at one point, the whole franchise had drastically lost appeal through the mismanagement of the Saturn era.
