Soundwave on 29 May 2017
| AlfredoTurkey said: Consoles win or lose based on image. What label a console gets out of the gates almost always dooms it propels it down the line. Wii U was confusing, niche and childish when it launched. It shared a name of a console (Wii) that was not enjoyed by "core" gamers. Once it got a bad label, that was it. Consoles do not storm back from that sort of thing. |
Yeah GameCube largely got stuck with the same rap too -- it looked like a Fisher Price toy so it got labelled "kiddie console" right from the get go and no amount of Resident Evil was going to change that. It's actually remarkable how much a console's ultimate success relies on the marketing/messaging/perception delivered in the first couple of months of its life.
There's very, very few systems that have ever really "changed their image" over time, you are right about that. I think Sega Genesis was maybe one, but I can't think of many others.
