Why did the Gamecube fail?

[Soundwave]

Nobody knew what the fuck a "third party game" was in the NES era, lol. That wasn't a thing. All games were just "Nintendo games" and even all video games were just called "Nintendo" even if you were playing a Tiger handheld or something.

But if you're saying the NES wasn't heavily fuelled by 3rd party content, you're crazy, Ninja Turtles, Megaman 2, Contra, Castlevania, Tecmo Bowl, Ninja Gaiden, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear, all being exclusive was a huge, huge reason the NES routed the Sega Master System. It was like the VHS versus Beta debate ... VHS had way more selection, the NES was VHS, Sega was Beta. The modern idea of "Nintendo games" really doesn't come into view until the N64 really when Nintendo lost most of their developer support and the idea of a "Nintendo console" became mainly just Nintendo games.

Nintendo themselves didn't even release that many NES games, from 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991, they published 13 NES titles, that's 13 games over 48 months, that's actually very low, even the Wii U had a steadier release of Nintendo games than that. It didn't matter because the NES had not only all the 3rd party support, but all of it basically exclusive.

Back to the GameCube, another HUGE blow to the system Nintendo losing the GoldenEye/FPS console of choice banner they held in the N64/PSOne era. The N64 was massively popular on college campuses and dorms and a lot of that stemmed from GoldenEye being really the forefather of Call of Duty. I knew many PSOne owners that still felt they had to have an N64 too and a lot of people would say "I like Playstation better, but I gotta have GoldenEye".

Losing 007 + Rare + MS getting Halo and stealing that FPS console crown hurt the GameCube badly. GoldenEye I think really sold as many N64s as Mario 64 did in North America and Europe. It would be in the top 10 TRST (the NPD back in the day) best selling games month after month after month after month.

In hindsight not locking up the 007/Bond license when it was dirt cheap and telling Rare they're working on a Bond sequel was a mistake. You don't let designers just do whatever the fuck they feel like, this isn't after school computer club, this is a business. I knew many, many people that owned both the N64 + Playstation, but PS2 + GameCube ownership was really, really rare. No GoldenEye tier title really had a lot to do with that. Smash Melee was alright but it was more something for "Nintendo hardcore" types, GoldenEye had far broader appeal.