Thought experiment: The year is 2005, the GameCube is a failure, what should Nintendo's next console be like?

[Final-Fan]

RolStoppable said:

Final-Fan said:

I'm not sure how well the SNES part of your argument holds up; it's not that far behind the NES and had less time on the market if I'm not mistaken.  But that doesn't invalidate the thrust of your post by any means. 

And the N64 had less time on the market than the SNES and isn't that far behind it (NES vs. SNES difference: ~12m; SNES vs. N64: ~17m). And the NES had to sell to a cold market (meaning it had to establish a market) while the SNES didn't face that obstacle.

But the most important thing for the current state of the video game market is that the SNES had locked the majority of Japanese third party support (and it was exclusive), thus preventing competitors from rising in Japan and in turn boosting the SNES's sales. Nintendo is not going to have such an advantage again.

If you mean that the N64 launched well after the PS1 was eating up that gen's market, didn't the SNES launch in competition with the Genesis? That system predated it by some time. Or do you refer to the Wii's loss of momentum before the Wii U's release?