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Soundwave on 09 February 2017
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oniyide said:
Soundwave said:
Just with regards to some of the historical Nintendo console discussion, I do think it's fair to note a few things though.

For one there's a tendency to overrate (if you will) "success". Like the thinking that

NES = godlike execution because it sold well
GameCube = terrible because it didn't sell well

Well I mean if you gave the GameCube the same circumstances the NES had .... only Sega really to compete against (so lets remove Sony and MS) and also gave the GameCube a lock out chip that forced third parties to only make GameCube games (so now Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, TimeSplitters, are all GameCube exclusive) who doesn't think the GameCube sells at least 65 million with the same circumstances?

Hell, it'd probably sell 150 million like the PS2 did.

The level of competition and circumstances of the generation make a huge difference to the end result.

Because if we go that route, we might have to admit that maybe, MAYBE Ninty isnt the be all end all in this whole video game thing. and when faced with actual competition...well you see what's been happening

Yup, even Iwata himself said Nintendo sucks at competing, lol. 

The NES era was great obviously but to put it on a pedestal and completely shit on GameCube and say the GameCube was "wrong", well ok, there's plenty of criticism of the GameCube that's fair, but if the GameCube could talk it'd probably say "hey, life's not so fucking easy when you don't have every third party game exclusive and only have to compete against Sega, a company that is dwarfed financially by Nintendo". 

Nintendo bullied Sega to the point where they even got retailers to not stock Sega products period, during the Genesis days Sega had to fight just to get the Genesis into stores because Nintendo had an iron clad grip on the retail market. 

Give the GameCube the same circumstances and it would sell past the NES even. So is the 'concept' of the system itself "wrong" then? No. It just shows Nintendo is not so tough as a console maker when they don't have the advantage of a third party monopoly and weak competetion to stomp all over.

They do deserve criticism for taking such a good situation and naively allowing others to move onto their turf, but that is a different can of worms. They should have just bought off Sony and let them release their stupid little SNES CD-ROM and allowed it to fail or be a Japan only thing like the Satelview and Famicom Disk Drive was, and then just given them the contract for the N64 sound chip again to appease them. There was no sense in making an enemey out of them.