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Kerotan on 29 September 2016
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

There's pros/cons to both sides. On one hand the Wii was incredibly successful for 4 years, but dropped like a rock afterwards. 

On the other hand, had the GameCube been successful, it likely would've resulted in a lower peak but much longer than 4 years of success. 

There likely would be no Microsoft XBox in the business and Sega would still be out, leaving Nintendo to probably sell 50-55 million GCNs, then with the Playstation 3, if Sony had made the $600 error, Nintendo likely would've pounced on that and won that generation or at the very least made great inroads. So maybe a hypothetical "GameCube 2" sells 70-80 million units like the XBox 360 did. 

Motion gaming still could've been a thing on a hypothetical "GameCube 2" or even the GameCube itself ... Nintendo was researching the idea as early as 2001 (see the article), it was originally intended for the GameCube. 

The Wii sold over 10m units in its fifth year, so that's a bar that a 50m-selling GC wouldn't be able to touch, meaning no chance that your hypothetical GC would have longer success than the Wii.

The second flaw in your thinking is that Microsoft would not have bowed out after selling only 10m Xboxes (or however much it would have managed in your hypothetical scenario). Xbox was a defensive business strategy for Microsoft in order to prevent the what-they-believed looming disruption of Windows as an entertainment platform by Sony's PlayStation. The real Xbox lost $4 billion in four years and that didn't stop Microsoft from putting out another console because protecting the profits of Windows justified such an expense. The hypothetical Xbox might have lost even more money than that, but Microsoft's motivation would still have been in place, so the Xbox 360 would have come into existence either way. And it would have launched in 2005 all the same because the original Xbox (real or hypothetical) was a lost cause. Microsoft would still have thrown money at the problem, ran a major image campaign and bought plenty of third party support.

Meanwhile, Nintendo would have believed that they are fine after improving their numbers from the Nintendo 64 to the GC, so they would have put out a straight-forward GC2 and got beaten by both Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo would have launched their console in 2006 and gradually lost third party support for all the same reasons as in the real sixth generation, and their first party software might have been even more experimental as Super Mario Sunshine and The Wind Waker would have sold more copies on a console that sold 50m units.

Ultimately, all your hypothetical scenario achieves is postpone the inevitable: The realisation that Nintendo does not fit into a console market that increasingly becomes more about selling a dumbed down PC, because on one hand Nintendo's roots aren't the ones of a PC company and on the other hand consumers do not expect nor want Nintendo to put out a dumbed down PC. What you refer to as the traditional console market is incorrect, because the traditional console market was about bringing arcade games into people's homes and the original console hit games that were created had arcade-like gameplay at their respective cores; it was not about bringing PC games to consoles which is what Sony and Microsoft are all about nowadays.

Considering this was never replied to I take it the OP was in agreement?  This is my line of thought aswell. 

 

I'd just like to ask you Rol.  If you could create the ideal Nintendo machine,  would it be $400,  as powerful as the ps4 pro,  all the Nintendo console and handheld games on it,  plus 90% of third party support.  Or would you go for something else?