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Soundwave on 07 May 2026
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HoloDust said:
Soundwave said:

GameCube just would have sold more if there was no XBox. 

GameCube had a lot of good things going for it including significantly better hardware than the PS2, it just got drowned out by too many systems all trying to basically do the same thing and MS willing to lose like $120/system back then. 

No XBox and people would've come around to the GameCube having some really strong exclusives (Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, Wind Waker, etc.), better graphics than the PS2, and easier to program for to developers.

And yet, MS, going into panic mode, saw only Sony and PS2 as a Trojan horse of sorts that can threaten MS's core business. They feared that if Sony "owned" the living room with a device that didn't run Windows, developers would stop writing software for PCs and start writing for Sony’s proprietary architecture and could eventually move into the office. Yeah, I know...seems crazy from this POV, yet XBOX was born out of it.

As I said, from my perspective, it did what it was intended to do - stop Sony's monopoly, not just gamer wise, but more importantly developer wise, offered platform to PC devs and paved way to both how consoles and games for them are made in the future. No, it didn't do what Sony did to Nintendo with PS1, but I doubt anyone expected that exact result back then anyway.

They would have been better off just staking the GameCube and working out a deal with Nintendo. Having two weak secondary options didn't stop Sony from doing anything, in fact it would be preferable to Sony to have the competition split like that rather than having one strong no.2. They could have just made games like Halo for the GameCube exclusively and maybe weened Nintendo towards allowing Windows CE to be used like Sega did in the GameCube development environment. 

Instead they wasted billions of dollars on the XBox to accomplish very little. 

They should have been paying attention to Apple, that was where the real threat was, not Sony. Because of that, the primary computer a lot of people use most today is a device running an Apple or Android OS, Microsoft just missed the boat entirely on that. No one cares about a console OS today.