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

[curl-6]

Soundwave said:

curl-6 said:

There were 007 games on Gamecube/PS2, they just didn't pop off the way Goldeneye did without the talent of 90s Rare behind it.

It's not enough to just have the IP, you've also got to be able to make a great game with it. Goldeneye wasn't a phenomenon just cos it had the Bond license, it was cos it was a brilliant and innovative title that set new standards for the genre in both single and multiplayer.

If you made stuff like Agent Under Fire GC exclusive it wouldn't have really moved the needle.

Agent Under Fire sold like 5+ million copies, so that wasn't exactly bad. More than that Bond was becoming synonymous with the Nintendo brand, losing that was a big mistake. Bond is cool, you can't really even get cooler than Bond and he's also multi-generational, teenagers think he's cool, but so do parents. Nintendo didn't even fully leverage that enough, they were surprised that GoldenEye was a hit, they should have had TV commercials with Pierce Brosnan for the N64. 

I would just said to Rare like basically "I'm paying your salary so you're going to make another Bond game because this is a business not a passion project art class, tough shit". 

Agent Under Fire's sales (spread as they were across an install base of about 200 million) benefitted hugely from Goldeneye being so huge, but that didn't last long term cos players realized that these following titles weren't as great as Goldeneye.

The problem was that by the Gamecube generation, much of the talent that made Rare such a powerhouse on the N64 had left the building; a lot of key staff departed around the end of the N64 to early Gamecube gen. The Bond license itself was nothing enough (badum tsss) you had to have a dev behind it who could craft a megaton hit out of it.