| padib said: Nothing antagonistic about my post, everything is cool. The reason why he is backed up is due to causation. Nobody will back up a dysfunctional console. It doesn't mean that his argument is bible. The importance of a games library that is on point is absolutely undeniable. But to say it is the only thing that matters is incorrect. For instance, the GBA had a very japan-oriented library and it sold less than its brethren. To understand why, you need to look at other factors such as competition (in this case internal competition, Nintendo itself). The GBA was cut short due to the early arrival of the DS, it dropped fast. Also, Nintendo consoles tend to follow the drum beat of Nintendo while other consoles would not have needed that in order to continue to succeed. But then there is also the question, if the GBA was the 2nd pillar, why did it not continue to thrive? The answer is related to platform competition, you couldn't at that time have software so easily released everywhere esp. due to lack of HW parity, so the library would've been split. Devs just preferred to migrate to DS. |
Fair point but then let's look at the two platforms that did get some support despite their failure in the Vita and the Saturn. Both despite their disastrous runs got decent enough support and as a result got sales just shy of 6m more than half of what PS3 and PS4 have managed.
Saturn even had the notorious rep of being hard to develop for and some function issues yet it is Sega's best performing hardware in the region. Other Sega platforms never got the same level of support it did as developers opted for Nintendo often, the support is what gave the platform momentum to reach its LT performance.
So even a flawed platform with support can still do something of note which is why ultimately it is not whether something is portable or not it is whether the library is there to add appeal and consoles for 15 years weren't doing that.
