| Shadow1980 said: The GameCube had decent third-party support, but it fell way short of the PS2 in that regard, and even the Xbox had better third-party suport than the GC. The likely culprit? The little guy on the left here:
With less than one-third the capacity of even a single-sided single-layer DVD (1.5GB vs. 4.7GB), the GC's proprietary miniDVD format didn't do the system any favors. Now, I know there's all the "Well, they could have just split the game across multiple discs" talk, and sure, there's been plenty of multi-disc games before and after, but A) they weren't exactly common, B) some games probably couldn't get split across multiple discs as they take place in a single contiguous environment (think GTA), and C) I honestly doubt that anybody really wanted to split their games across multiple discs and usually only did so when it was necessary (even CD's 700MB capacity was not enough for many PS1 games; it was just a hell of sight better than the 64MB that the biggest N64 carts could hold, plus CDs cost a lot less to make). Not only is it extra work to split just one port up into multiple discs, but it also incurs greater expense (you're talking about an extra dollar or two per copy in manufacturing costs, which does add up). While a handful of publishers felt it was worth it for at least some titles, many major third-party games that came to PS2 and Xbox were no-shows on the GameCube, and the non-standard format is the only plausible explanation why. |
The Xbox 360 had over 50 games which were multiple disc and it didn't seem to be a problem.
The X360 was an HD system stuck using DVDs while the PS3 was using high capacity Blu-rays.
Before they updated in 2011, X360 discs were locked at 6.8GB max due to a portion of the disc being reserved for security.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Wii was 7.4GB, that SD Wii game was bigger than a lot of single disc 360 games which were HD.
As for the Gamecube ports , the discs were a problem for larger open world games,
but most other games could be ported with multiple discs if they really wanted to.
The problem that generation was that most the better 3rd party games were payed exclusives and payed to stay off the other systems.
Also the original Xbox had some good 3rd party support, especially from the West, but it ended up doing just as poorly as the Gamecube in terms of system sales compared against the PS2.
