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Soundwave on 31 October 2013
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Shadow1980 said:
Arius Dion said:
The massive decline from gen to gen until the Wii shows Nintendo's console business in dire straits up until the Wii. Wii may have been 'made fun of on forums' and the like but its real world performance speaks for itself. Gamecube's performance speaks for itself as well.

Sales spikes is not as important as sustained sales. With 22m WW sold its obvious WW along with DD and Sunshine did not do their job.

You can play semantics all you want. But if Gamecube wasn't such a collasal failure, Iwata would not have stated it as one and Nintendo would not have changed their entire business strategy the following gen.

But I guess in your world 22m WW is just dandy. As is 300k in a quarter for Wii U? Gimme a break.


Mind checking the attitude at the door?

I never said the GC was a huge success. It was Nintendo's lowest-selling home console. What I did say was that calling it an abject failure is an exaggeration. It was profitable for one, so while Nintendo wasn't making as much money off of it as their older systems, they weren't losing money either. It also sold almost as much software as the N64, so in that department Nintendo was holding steady. The GC might not have performed well — and that's mainly attributable to the PS2 being an all-consuming black hole; the GC could never hope to compete with it, especially when it's having to fight with Xbox over the last remaining scraps  — but it certainly was no Jaguar or 3DO.

Also, does the Xbox selling 2 million more units than the GC really matter when it was never profitable for MS while the GC was profitable from day one? The only reason MS weathered the loss was because, well, they're Microsoft, and gaming was not a huge chunk of business.

Not to make too fine of a point of it, but Nintendo did actually sell the GameCube at a loss a couple of times during that generation if memory serves. At launch they were losing about $20/unit and when they dropped to $99 I believe they were losing money on the hardware at first too. Overall they did make a profit, but obviously they weren't happy with its performance overall.