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| spurgeonryan said: Are you saying they gambled on the GameCube or the switch? |
I wouldn't describe Gamecube as a "gamble" per se. It was a mostly standard, power-competitive home console.
It just had a number of poor choices that killed its appeal. Both its look and much of its first party output felt geared towards young children, at a time when gaming was shifting towards teenagers and adults. Many of Nintendo's games on it also made weird design choices that made them less appealing to a mainstream audience, like DK Jungle Beat being built around the bongo controller, Double Dash overcomplicating Mario Kart's elegant simplicity, Mario Sunshine featuring Mario as a janitor in a monotonous resort setting, Starfox becoming a mediocre Zelda clone, etc.
The Switch was more of a gamble, because the hybrid concept was unproven in terms of mainstream appeal. A few systems had tried something similar, but not to the same extent and not with major success. It paid off big time, but in 2017 it was a significant risk.
