Why did the Gamecube fail?

[SammyGiireal]

RolStoppable said:

SammyGiireal said:

The N64 had some of the greatest 3-D experiences ever made, they were even more mind blowing at the time of their release. This is the reason why it sold as well as it did despite its total lack of 3rd party support, and the absence of some of the most popular genres of the time such as JRPGs, and Fighting games.

Nintendo dug the N64's grave when they decided to go cartridge instead of CD, and drove away its third party support. The system however had some of the most revolutionary games ever made, and to deny this, is to deny facts.

You should address what I said. It doesn't matter if the Nintendo 64 had revolutionary games when it's abundantly clear in hindsight that the Nintendo 64's best games aren't on the same level as the likes of Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country trilogy, A Link to the Past and Super Metroid. Game quality was higher on the SNES than on the Nintendo 64.

Something that cannot be mentioned often enough is that the biggest factor in the shift of third party support in the fifth generation was not cartridges vs. CDs, but no moneyhats vs. aggressive moneyhats. If the Nintendo 64 had used CDs, third party games would have gone to the PS1 all the same because Sony was paying for them.

Wman1996 said:

I would strongly disagree with that. The only thing that was conducive to third-party support on the GameCube were the specs. The GCN was the second-most capable console of the sixth generation. And the N64 had been the most capable of the fifth. This was the last generation Nintendo was competitive in specs for home consoles.

The processing power, RAM, etc. were good for third-party developers. But Nintendo threw tons of hurdles in their way. Namely, Mini DVDs that crippled the size of games. Though admittedly, it was not as bad as using cartridges for the N64. Someone else said on this thread that the average PS2 game was about 3 GB. That's 2 GameCube discs. And most developers didn't want to deal with 2 discs, or they had to compress the game to fit it on one or two discs.

The GameCube controller was also not conducive to third-party games. There was only one bumper, no dedicated select button, an oversized A button/undersized X, B, Y buttons, and an undersized second analog stick.

And online on GameCube was virtually non-existent. That was a big slap in the face to third-party developers, especially as online console gaming was really picking up around 2002-2005.

Nintendo learned very few lessons from the N64 to GCN on designing their consoles for third-parties to take advantage of.

People keep having this habit of sticking up for bad third party developers. Whenever a third party pulls off some bullshit due to incompetence or laziness, way too many people choose to blame Nintendo for the result rather than the companies that actually made the games. There's real world data that it was doable for third parties to make high quality GC games, because there were third parties who could do it.

That's why the storage capacity of the GC's discs can't be an excuse. That's why the amount of buttons on the GC controller wasn't a big issue because most games didn't need so many buttons to begin with. Online gaming wasn't a big deal during the sixth generation either.

What you are doing here is the equivalent of sticking up for WWE 2k18 on Switch by coming up with all possible excuses.

"The game has a partial download because Nintendo chose an expensive storage medium." - Somehow not a problem for The Witcher 3.

When you judge a console, you do so by its best games, not its worst. It's bad enough that third parties have a long history of pulling off bullshit on Nintendo consoles, but it's even worse for gamers to defend said bullshit when there's actual evidence of what was really possible.

Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask to name a few ...disagree with your take.  I have more fun with those games today than I do when replaying the SNES games, and need I remind you that OoT got the highest ever Meta rating, a record that still stands today. Back in 1998 all of those critics had played ALttP and other SNES games.

Sorry, but the N64 had some of the greatest games ever made, and Cartridges were the primordial reason for 3rs parties abandoning Nintendo. Sony did offer the devs better royalties. But Nintendo wanted devs and third party publisher to shell out 1 mill for 100,000 cartridges. If your game didnt sell you were left in a bad spot. The investment required in making an N64 games was much riskier because of this.

People wanted 3-D in the mid nineties, and people wanted the Nintendo 64 the system had record sales that were driven by Mario 64 ( people wanted a 3-D Mario), and only slowed down because of the draught in games and their price.