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Ljink96 on 09 January 2017
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GoOnKid said:
Soundwave said:

Partly yes and no. The NES, SNES, even the N64 had success with wider demographics beyond just the "family market". GameCube is where it starts to fall apart, partly because Nintendo allows yet another competitor (Microsoft) to just show up and walk all over them. 

Case in point, before XBox Nintendo was known as THE system to get for First Person Shooters. Think about that for a second, such a thought would be absurd today. 

Nintendo constantly has let Sony/MS walk onto their turf and take away genres they used to be known for .... Japanese RPGs, fighting games, FPS are all genres that had their first huge successes on Nintendo consoles, and Nintendo allowed the audiences for all these games to go elsewhere. 

They should have been far more proactive, how there wasn't an emergency meeting during the N64's development circa 1994/1995 to say "we need to accept CD-ROM because we're losing all our developers" is to this day still mind boggling in its utter and sheer incompetence. 

The same goes for why they went with a tablet Gamepad. They had their reasons back then, but they couldn't have known that it wouldn't pay off (and on top of that we all know that the Wii U had several more problems).

I mean, the Gamepad was really unnecessary. It was novel and that's where it stopped. Nintendo didn't even know what to do with it. They just used it as inventory screens or other HUDs. 

I understand it might make them stick out to have something like the Gamepad but there was really no reason why Nintendo couldn't have made a gamepadless sku and design their games with that sku in mind as well. The only game that really uses it well is Mario Maker. While it isn't as great to use the pro controller as the gamepad, they could have just used wiimotes for the cursor or made an android/ios app that allows you to build your level on the phone and send it to your Wii U. They had options, they just didn't exploit them. They saw the WIi U crashing before their eyes but they just...let it. 

Maybe Switch development took over around late 2014 and they knew they had to move on, the writing was already on the wall so to speak.