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Otter on 12 December 2024
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curl-6 said:

The Gamecube failed because there was little reason to own one.

PS2 had more games and played DVDs, and Xbox had Halo. The only thing Gamecube had in its favour was Nintendo games, and Nintendo shot itself in the foot there by taking a lot of its games in an unappealing direction, like Mario Sunshine featuring Mario as a janitor at a monotonous resort setting, Zelda looking like a children's cartoon, Double Dash overcomplicating Mario Kart's simple appeal, Donkey Kong doing the lame bongo gimmick, Starfox becoming a mediocre Zelda clone, etc.

GBA had the benefit of having hardly any competition and it was more in line with the tastes of its target audience.

I think it should also be stated (in Nintendo's defence), that multi-console ownership is not common unless there is a lot of distinction in how the systems function. Even if Nintendo came out swinging with Twilight Princess and Mario Odyssey on Gamecube, I think the weight of exclusive IPs & variety on playstation side (Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Tekken, GTA3) and how they reflected in public taste in more edgy, progressive media in gaming at the turn of the millenium, would put a hard ceiling on what Nintendo could achieve with their IP (IMO 30-ish million). Maybe that ceiling could of risen had Nintendo not launched a year later than PS2 and they couldn've eaten a bit more into that fixed console market pie which appears every generation to loosely be around 180-200m

In real terms I also think its worth stating that Nintendo could have lived healthily off a series of 30m selling home consoles as long they continue to
 
1. Sell hardware at a profit.
2. Have loyal fans which give 30-50% attach rates o their biggest 1st party software.

I do not think the gamecube was a financial failure but if anyone has the numbers correct me if I'm wrong.

Sony on the other hand could not survive off their IP alone back in 2001. They needed 3rd party software, and they needed to shift huge amounts of hardware to secure exclusibity and enough revenue from that software