Sales Point Of No Return for Platforms

[PAOerfulone]

Sephiran said:

h2ohno said:

For the Gamecube, I think that system was doomed the moment Sony gained the market lead in the 5th gen. The Gamecube was the console the N64 should have been in 1996 rather than the console that was needed in 2001, and by then it was too late to win back those who jumped ship to Sony or got into gaming with the PS1 just by finally adopting disks, even if the console was again more powerful than Sony's. The Gamecube was Nintendo trying to fight the previous war instead of the then-current one. Even in a perfect world where the Gamecube launched at the same time as the PS2 with the same DVD support and used the same size disks so it could get all the same multiplats, and even if it by some miracle could keep the same low price it had in 2001 while having all of this and the same powerful hardware, it would still have finished a very, very distant second to the PS2 and I think its upper limit would have been the N64's sales totals. Its best-case scenario would have been to slow the decline in Nintendo console sales for a generation.

Yeah, the Gamecube was basically dead on arrival due to Nintendo's brand being lower than ever before, the Gamecube was pretty good hardware for its time but it didn't matter because the PS brand was just so strong and the Nintendo brand was so weak at that point that nothing Nintendo would have done back then would have made any difference.

Looking back its incredible that Nintendo made such a comeback with the Wii, because during the Gamecube it looked like the would be the next Sega pretty soon.

The difference between Nintendo and SEGA was that SEGA was bleeding money off of their consoles selling them at huge losses like their handhelds, their peripherals like the CD and 32x, the Saturn, and especially the Dreamcast. So even when the Dreamcast got off to a hot start, it came at a cost to their revenue and profits, with the losses proving too steep to overcome and then when the PS2 was revealed and launched, that was all she wrote for SEGA in the hardware market.

Nintendo on the other hand, with 1 or 2 exceptions, has always sold their consoles at a profit from the get-go, so even though the GameCube sales were underwhelming, it was still profitable, same with the N64, and during this time, while their console lineup was weak, their handhelds were a totally different story. The Game Boy lineup from the OG to the Advance was still very strong and carrying them - This new thing at the time called Pokemon was to thank for that.

If the Wii didn't take off like it did and proved to be another failure or decline, then at worst, Nintendo would have stopped making consoles and just stuck with handhelds much like how Sony eventually stopped making handhelds after the Vita's failure and just stuck to consoles. And if they stuck to handhelds, we'd most likely eventually reach the point where we are now with the Switch.