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Soundwave on 16 May 2023
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TheBraveGallade said:

I mean... nintendo has never really done too well when they tried to appeal to the market by sheer hardware power.

its almost always been when its the most affordable option/ has a killer feature/app while still being affordable that they won.

they barely outsold the genesis in the 16 bit war, completly bungled up the n64 and gamecube sales wise, and when they tried to one up the competition by opening the generation like 2 years early with the wii U they crashed and burned.

even more so with handhelds. gameboy had none of the flashy expensive stuff and it blew everything else out the water by being cheap and long lasting battery wise, and the 3ds struggled initially untill they dropped the price by 40% (something that the more advanced vita, already loss leading at 250, could not follow).
the only sucess i can think of where nintendo blew competition out of the water and working was the GBA, which with its superior hardware and decent price literally blew away any semblence of niche competion in the hardware space that still existed at that point.

N64 would have beaten the Playstation if it weren't for the CD-ROM issue, that's not really the N64's fault. It got shot in its foot at birth for no good reason. The more I think about Nintendo in the mid-90s, the more I think Yamauchi was smoking crack cocaine because crippling the N64 and thinking the Virtual Boy was not only a product worthy of a full blown hardware launch but that it could actually sell 3 million units in a few months (Yamauchi's projection) was totally into crazy town. 

GameCube had a myriad of marketing and software library and timing issues on top of looking like (well) a 8 year old's lunch box which was never going to fly in the early 2000s. Giving the PS2 an 18 month headstart was also an absolute back breaker, you've already lost before you've even entered the market. 

Super NES did fine, it's just that the Genesis was a much, much more fierce competitor than the wet fart that was the Sega Master System and still Nintendo probably would've trounced them but Sega caught a lucky break in Nintendo censoring Mortal Kombat in 1993. But they would allow blood in for 1994 with MK2 and got Donkey Kong Country and Sega imploded.  

Last edited by Soundwave - on 16 May 2023