though,as a multiconsole owner and appreciator of many games on all systems,my 'hope' is to see the market spread as evenly as possible between Sony,MS and Nintendo.

I stand corrected, however my point regarding MS marketing spin is still valid. XB performed on a par with the GC yet the XB is hailed as a success whereas the GC is deemed to be a flop.

Yes Nintendo is back for good, I don´t need any data to prove it, anybody who knows action movies knows how it goes: Nintendo was the best in the land but beeing best made him arrogant and then new fighter challenged and beat him, stealing his girl (3rd parties). But then came a 80 montage scene where nintendo did some pushups and jogged through a coold forest or city. What we are seeing now is the epic end-fight. Is Nintendo going to win ??? Of course it will, but maybe the ending will leave room for a sequel: NextGenWars2: The Return of SEGA

Well there are some reasons why the Xbox is percieved to have done better. For one thing, it's software sales were much higher for Microsoft's Box. Also, the Xbox significantly outperformed the Cube in NA and Europe, which is where most people around here happen to live.

Finally there's one of perceptions and expectations. This was supposed to be Nintendo's reclamation of the thrown. Instead they lost even more market share and placed third to a new kid on the block; The Xbox. The Xbox was well positioned to enter a new console in the next gen, while nobody really cared about Nintendo's new console until it turned out to be so different.  Asside from Profit, it makes perfect sense to me say that the Box outperformed the Cube.

Like finding out that someone born in the 90's attends my university (apparently in Russia, you graduate high school at 16), hearing that someone was born after the SNES was released scares the crap out of me. But then I have to realize: I started posting on forums when I was 15. Do some math, and 2007 - 15 = 1992. The world is growing up. It's scary. A new generation of small people who are going to annoy the crap out of me until they grow up in a few years and learn that chokers don't look good on *everything,* are just now discovering the internet. I'm old. Maybe that's what my receding hairline is trying to tell me. On topic: how up-to-date is current data? I doubt GC will overtake Xbox sales overall, but considering that GC is still selling at, what, 20K units a month? It just might close the gap to the point of insignificance, if Nintendo is really lucky. Not that it matters... that's just some minutia at this point: what really matters is what's happening with Wii. I feel like wareagle was just born, and it's 199X again, and I'm busy pissing myself because I thought I beat Gannon, but he sent me to this scary-ass place where I'm a bunny, and giant cyclopses are throwing bombs at me.

So the GC was a flop because it had some great exclusives but the XB was a success because it sold at similar levels with less exclusives?

I think what you are trying to say is that the GC was a 'relative' flop in comparison to previous N consoles wheras the XB performed 'reasonably' well for a 1st console.

I could easily argue that XB was a flop because a company with MS's power, that was able to buy in exclusives and buy-out Rare, Bizarre and so on should be able to crush a relatively small and strugling (at the time) company like Nintendo who had very little 3rd party support.

I could argue that other 1st time consoles have sold massively and that the XB is a flop when put next to the NES or PS1. 

All of this is irrelevant, however, and the only fair way to judge the success of a console is on sales. In this regard they both performed at a very similar level and should be judged accordingly.

Microsoft venture into the video game business has been if not a disaster than a dissapointment, losing so much money year after year. Beating the GameCube in sales doesn't mean the X-Box was a success. The GameCube made Nintendo a profit and what microsoft got from the X-Box and continues to get with the 360 is hundreds of millions of dollars of loses.

Without a doubt. Xbox never had a profitable quarter while the gamecube has.

Oh, for that other guy, i am 16. my first video game console is the gameboy pocket, and first home console is the N64.

the main reasons why Nintendo wasn't succesful the past 10 years is that they made no revolution. With the N64, the main thing they revolutionized was the joystick (which impacts video game console even to this day). N64 was a success, but Sony provided more exclusives. Gamecube........didn't really do anything special. It was a mediocre console which is why it lacked sales. The Wii revolutionizes games once again, and is why their sales are so great. The handhelds between gameboy pocket and GBA didn't revolutionize that much, but they had no competition until the PSP came out. Then they revolutionized games through touch screens. Long Story Short. I believe nintendo is back.

 Yeah... I just want you to know, for your own information... anybody born in the 90's isn't actually allowed to be called a person.  Only sub-humans were born that decade.  I should know.  My sister was born in '93.  She's as sub-human as they come, and astonishingly enough, I've seen other people-- erm, excuse me, I've seen other things around her age that are even subber-human.

Really, eagle, I'm kinda sorry for you.