Can NINTENDO make traditional home console that sells well?

[Soundwave]

Nintendo could've beaten Sony in the PSOne era if they weren't stupid and compromised on the CD-format with their SNES third party partners. Mario 64 + GoldenEye + Zelda: OoT + Final Fantasy VII + no game droughts because of CD format = game over for Sony. N64 was outselling the Playstation well into 1997 even, it only started to fall behind because of terrible game droughts brought on by the cartridge format.

With GameCube they made a lot of other dumb errors, not one single huge mistake like the no-CD on N64, but a lot of really stupid unforced errors like launching too far behind the PS2, even though the GameCube hardware was ready for 2000 (should have shifted development from N64 earlier), made the system look like a child's toy, used DVD basically but no DVD playback (I mean you're paying for what is a damn DVD drive anyway, why purposely shoot yourself in the foot?), not having a new Mario game at launch and instead banking on a small scale title like Luigi's Mansion, going from GoldenEye and PD to ... uh Geist? Losing Rare and then replacing that with nothing, etc. etc. etc. etc.

After the PS2/XBox/GCN gen Sony/MS were too established. Never should have allowed MS at the very least to gain a foothold in the industry. The GameCube at minimum needed to kill the XBox, but Nintendo's execution was way too sloppy and gave MS way too much room to take advantage of.

Traditional console business is really about making the fewest mistakes. Nintendo's not really good at not making mistakes, even with successful systems they to occasionally want to do stupid things for whatever reason, you can't really do that. The only console Sony has made that had big errors in it was the PS3, and the main problem there was the high price tag which could be alleviated over time. The PS1, PS2, and PS4 all were on point, price wise, tech wise, marketing wise, developer support wise, and very rarely ever have game droughts (because every developer on the planet is making games). There's just not much room Sony gives to competitors, they make very few errors so if you want to beat them head to head you can't be sloppy. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 28 May 2018