Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[Soundwave]

curl-6 said:

burninmylight said:

The GCN had an easily debunked and undeserved reputation for being weak among non-forum dwelling denizens for A) going with mini-discs with a smaller storage capacity, B) Looking like a preschooler's lunchbox and C) getting half-ass ports of games made with other systems in mind.

Yeah it's remarkable how many people back then thought Gamecube was weaker than the PS2, when even at the time the specs and info were easily accessible online.

Bit like how so many people thought Switch 1 was on par with PS3/360 or Switch 2 is on par with PS4, again despite all the proof to the contrary.

The 90s/early 2000s was the quintessential time of marketing fluff/hype overriding all. 

A lot of people thought the Sega Genesis had better hardware than the Super NES too because of Sega's marketing. 

PS2 was egregious bullshit though, Sony trying to claim 66 million polygons per second, we know now that most PS2 games really didn't push beyond 2-4 million polys/sec as was mentioned earlier in this thread. But people just seized on that phony number to say "wow 66 million blows away Sega Dreamcast's 2-3 million polys!".

You can see again here, Enter the Matrix was a big ticket multiplat release of that era (tons of hype):

GameCube has better image quality and way better frame rate (go to 5:05). XBox has the highest frame rate, but that was also a hardware where MS was losing like $100+ per unit. GameCube was the best engineered system that gen and dollar for dollar the best performance and just flat out better than the PS2, GameCube was more like a PS2 Pro.