Wii and NES easily had the most powerful in house first party software lineup. Wii Sports and Super Mario Bros remain to this day the most successful killer apps in video game history. Both consoles also had robust lineups of compelling first party software that dominated the sales charts.
N64 is the next place. While not quite as powerful, Ocarina of Time brought back memories of the hype machine that was Super Mario Bros 3. First party software and Rare carried the console, as it otherwise had an anemic third party lineup.
SNES is winning, but people are conflating third party software. Forgetting that the first party software wasn’t all that spectacular.
GameCube and Wii U failed as home consoles because of weak first party lineups and nothing particularly interesting in third party software either. The lack of compelling software translated into lack of interest in the consoles as a whole. But Wii U’s experience was worsened by the shoddy hardware, as games like Mario Kart were substantially more fun to play on Switch thanks to much more content and features on top of it being possible the biggest local multiplayer game in history. Mario Kart 8 is a great example of how a mediocre game on one hardware can be a killer app on another.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
