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burninmylight on 31 December 2024
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Salnax said:
  1. The GBA launched at half the GameCube's price and its games were often significantly cheaper.
  2. There was no major competition in the handheld space from 2001 to 2004.
  3. The GBA had main series Pokemon games, which can basically carry any platform to decent success.
  4. The GBA was compatible with something like 2000 GB and GBC games dating back to the 80's. The GameCube couldn't even play N64 games.
  5. The GBA was a great candidate for porting/remaking NES and SNES games, which were high quality games that weren't easily available. Examples include the Super Mario Advance quadrilogy, Link to the Past, Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, Classic NES series, and various compilations.
  6. When Nintendo released the DS, they continued to support the GBA for a couple more years with the Game Boy Micro, the Player's Choice line, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, Mario spinoffs, publishing Square Enix ports, etc. Something like 20 to 25% of GBA's sold in Japan were sold after the DS's launch.

#5 is an good point that seems to be underrated in this thread. The GBA was a JRPG factory at a time when JRPGs were at their peak popularity in the West, helped in large part by a deluge of NES/SNES ports and remakes, many of which were brand new to non-Japanese gamers. We got ports/remakes of things like Final Fantasy I-VI and Tales of Phantasia, and countless others.

If I could add a #7, I'd say that something the GBA had in its favor was that it was now the sole outlet for smaller developers/projects that still wanted to produce simple 2-D low budget games. The game industry in the early 2000s was still in that "2-D console gaming is a thing of the past, 3-D is the future!" phase where 2-D games were considered passé, but not on the little handheld that could. So game makers could pump out GBA games way faster than on any home console and take more risks. That's how we got three Fire Emblems, two Advance Wars, two Golden Suns, a thousand Mega Man Battle Networks, three Iga Castlevanias, two Metroids, and so on.