I don't find it as a fail at all. If they teamed up who knows what Nintendo would be like now with that input from their "partner" Sony. They for sure wouldn't be the same as now! The PS2 was a success and the NGC was nowhere near as good, but look at this generation, things change... quickly.

It ventures too far off into the what-if realm for my liking. The Super Nintendo add-on PlayStation would have been just as ineffective as the Sega CD, and Nintendo would likely have seen its IP tampered with under Sony's watch much as they were by Philips. The venture would have ended sourly and PlayStation may very well have come into being anyway, since Sony obviously had eyes on the console gaming market

Multi-media has been a big factor in consumer decision to purchase, and multi-functionality even more so beyond it. Look at Blu-ray for the PS3 and a bunch of people got the PS3 for the other OS feature...when it was there. Cross game chat is huge on the 360. The PS3 is the largest Netfilx viewing device and the 360 isn't far behind. There is a reason Wii sales have died off. That and there were games that used multiple disks so not sure what your saying about wasted space, it provided stable diversity for game size.

The reason Wii sales died off is that Nintendo stopped making compelling games for it. Never has it had anything to do with multimedia features in any significant numbers.

This come up quite often with people assuming Nintendo being stupid for backing out of the deal when Sony tried to bully them.

Sony was going to have rights to all Nintendo IP, too, I think?

Yeah, you're right the contract was complete bull. But niether of them knew what they were doing. Launching a SNES-CD console while Sony released a console on the side that played SNES cartridges and Sony CD's (not SNES-CD's that would be limited to the SNES-CD). Yes there was a clause that gave Sony way too much control over games written on SNES-CD, not the IP's but just the games and associated stuff with them. Nintendo still owned the IP's.

I guess Nintendo backing out was good for gaming, prevented whatever crazyness was in that contract. It's still a bummer for Nintendo that it created such a strong competitor and as I mentioned earlier probably contributed to Sega's Dreamcast ship sinking. Too many slices not enough pie, thought the same thing would happen when the Xbox came out but look how big the gaming market is now!

I think you might have missed this.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-netflix-and-hulu-users-are-watching-and-how/

Hmm...I heard a quote from someone about PS3 and game consoles...it wasn't as new as that data and I'd say 12,000 people a decent sample, though they are online interviews so maybe its skewed because they are speaking to people using computers most likely, but then again most people have computers. Alright, there still are quite a lot of non gaming features to current gen consoles, and they are quite popular, netflix/hulu among them.

I'm regretting the biggest mistake intro to this thread as its hard to justify Nintendo and Sony going through with that contract, since it stepped on toes and planned on making 2 consoles that probably would have been a mere shadow of what PlayStation eventually became. I'm just bored and had a bad day at work and needed an excuse to talk about consoles without resorting to next gen.