| Naum said: No "we" don't buy alot 3rd party games beacuse 75% of them either suck, miss key features, severly overpriced or doesn't have the main fanbase fot that kind of game |
That doesn't explain the GameCube era, where Nintendo fans bought far fewer third party games than XBox owners even when they did have fairly good ports a lot of the time. Heck Nintendo would even let EA use Mario in things like NBA Street and SSX back in those days as a bonus.
As someone who grew up with the NES (gulp!) and SNES I think what happened is this -- when the N64 came out and became basically a Nintendo/Rare-only box, Nintendo's fanbase splintered into two groups, the first group who enjoyed third party games but still were Nintendo fans grew frustrated with Nintendo and eventually left them for Sony or Microsoft.
The second group became used to buying only Nintendo games on Nintendo platforms. As time went on this group became more and more narrow minded so that even Nintendo couldn't sell a wide variety of genres. For example NBA Courtside sold very well on the N64 from Nintendo in the late 90s, but even Nintendo couldn't sell that game on a Nintendo platform today.
Nintendo fanboys have become Mario/Zelda/DK/Pokemon/Kirby fanatics, and even Nintendo games like Sin & Punishment or Star Fox or F-Zero aren't being made anymore because there isn't an audience left for those games.
