G2ThaUNiT said:
Soundwave said:
GameCube would've been more appreciated and sold around 40-45+ million units.
Nintendo did a lot of things that gen that they don't get much credit for because the 2nd place race turned into a shit show.
Resident Evil exclusivity was huge, imagine Nintendo today getting an exclusivity deal on basically the no.1 or no.2 biggest 3rd party franchise of the time.
Things like Animal Crossing would probably be a bit more appreciated because Nintendo would basically be the only other game in town and with a cheap system, a lot of people just would've picked one up as a secondary console at least.
The GameCube hardware was really well made as well, even today games like Rogue Squadron II/III, Star Fox Adventures, F-Zero GX, Resident Evil 4, Zelda: Wind Waker, etc. look great. GameCube was just much better hardware than the PS2 and much easier to program for on top of that, if it was the only game in town I think it would have been more appreciated by developers. XBox kinda sucked the air out of all the work Nintendo did to make a killer piece of hardware because basically a PC-in-a-box subsidized to lose like $100+ per box was an even better proposition to some devs.
In hindsight the best thing Microsoft could have done was to just cut a deal with Nintendo if they were so worried about Sony and kinda become like a defacto 2nd party supporter for them to stake them against the PS2. Make games like Halo and Project: Gotham Racing (precursor to Forza) but just console exclusive for GameCube and then port them to Windows PC later.
Would've saved them probably 20 years of losing money, lol. A GameCube that would have Halo and Super Smash Bros. Melee and Star Wars Rogue Squadron in its launch window (along with support titles like Wave Race: Blue Storm and Super Monkey Ball) would be a pretty fantastic launch window.
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One big difference is that Halo wouldn't have been owned by Microsoft. So the franchise would've most likely would've been Mac exclusive as originally intended. The whole reason Microsoft bought Bungie in the first place was because they were looking for content for the Xbox's launch. If no Xbox, they wouldn't have had a need to buy Bungie. Or Bungie would've gone bankrupt and closed since they were really low on funds and played a huge reason why they were willing to sell to Microsoft.
So in that universe, Halo wouldn't exist either at all, or anywhere near the capacity that it was.
More people would've bought the Game Boy Player too since the GBA was so popular! Arguably one of the most underappreciated accessories in gaming history. Using a physical GBA to be able to play my entire Game Boy collection on a TV?! Brilliant!
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I would say they still go ahead and purchase Bungie/Halo ... Microsoft was still a game publisher at the time and it would have made them good money on the GameCube + PC. Maybe you even proceed with the purchase of Rareware (again GameCube + Windows PC would offer plenty of sales).
The change that I would have recommended to them is instead of foolishly blowing billions of dollars in the game console market, that you instead do what you can to help Nintendo counter Sony for a fraction of the cost.
Nintendo (especially of that time) certainly had holes in their library, a
Microsoft could have stepped in and helped out with games like Halo/Halo 2, Project Gotham Racing/Forza, Fable, continued Rareware support, etc.
