Not spawn and minion

OT: It had no competition in the handheld department, had mainline Pokémon and other beloved Nintendo IPs, it was cheap, and its third party support was actually pretty good. The Gamecube had the PS2 as competition, could not play DVDs, and was seen as kiddy in comparison to PS2 and Xbox. 

Microsoft sold more consoles and had more marketshare than Nintendo during the 6th gen.
Microsoft was trying to take marketshare and launch a new platform in a relatively mature market, so with that in mind... It was definitely a success.

In terms of financials, it was a massive failure, which is why they quickly scuttled the console and launched the Xbox 360 as nVidia didn't wish to renegotiate contracts.

The original Xbox paved the way for a lot of things, it established industry partnerships, technology, it established the Xbox as a brand.

In saying that... 22m consoles sold for the Gamecube verses 24m consoles for the Original Xbox is a pretty irrelevant difference in terms of units sold... The real winner of that generation was Sony by a country mile.

A platform can both be a success and a failure, we need to stop being so black and white with how we perceive things.

Pokemon!

And Perfect Dark, and other Rare games like Banjo Kazooie, Conker, Kameo: Elements of Power, Grabbed by the Ghoulies and so on.

All of those games were mediocre and forgettable at best, but under Nintendo's watch and dime, I'm confident that we would have gotten much better output from Rare.

That being said, I think there are a number of Xbox exclusives that wouldn't have existed if Nintendo is pushing the button: I remember DOA3 and Ninja Gaiden Black coming out at a time when Nintendo was firmly in its, "We don't need to make deals for exclusive T/M-rated games, we're a family company!" mindset. Resident Evil 4 wasn't actually an exclusivity deal; Mikami wanted it for the GCN because of the easier programming environment and even said that it wouldn't be ported elsewhere (lol).

"POKEMON! With the pokie and the mon and thing where the guy comes out of the thing and the rah rah rah!"

Funny enough GameCube actually had two Pokemon RPGs, Pokemon Box, and Pokemon Channel.

Not enough of the games people were looking for, I suppose.

I barely remember those games, but Pokemon Box was not a game, was somekind of an app for the GC to organize and save your pokemons in a GC Memory Card. It was a very strange product: you needed a GBA and the "(in)famous" GC-GBA cable Nintendo pretended to sell a lot (using FF and Zelda games as an excuse). I also remember it was very restricted in which pokémon games were compatible instead of being "a general GB pokemon games organizer and data saver". That last decision very much defeated its usefulness for the young Pokemon collectors.

Pokémon Channel was even more obscure to me, but always thought it was somekind of an "Hey You Pikachu" sequel... the game of the N64 microphone. Probably a game only for the most younger ones, and without the charisma of the N64 game. I've never seen nothing of it but the front box art.

The other 2 was the Colosseum, who sold more or less well (for a Gamecube game) and was basically a Stadium game, with some story to do.
And the other one was a more complete RPG, but i can't remember anything of it. No one does (was too late in the commercial life of the GC)

Pokemon in Gamecube had little impact compared with the Pokemon games for N64, and that was totally unexpected in late 2000, for sure, when Gamecube was presented in the last Space World. Maybe a good Pokémon game for the launch of the GC could have helped it to sell better, but it was not the case... Gamecube was so fastly obliterated in the market, by 2004 was basically a niche console. Even Pokemon games didn't help to boost its sells (like they in fact did during the last years of N64).

I never had any interest to play any of them, btw.

It's sorta similar to what happened with Sony in the 8th gen, when PS4 thrived but the Vita fell flat.
One device met the needs of its target audience while the other did not, due to the companies in question having a good understanding of one sector but not the other.

GC was great, and a simple "hack" in the market made by a newcomer in the presidency of Nintendo, like Satoru Iwata was, made the Gamecube hardware not selling anything in 2006... to sold 100 million units (as the Wii), being already 6 years old in 2006... All caused by the simple excuse of the "new" wiimote (a new controller they planned originally for the GC, during its late years. They had launched the "wiimote" for the GC in 2006... even 2005, and they would have sold NOTHING and nobody would remember that gimmick. Like the microphone for the GC in that Odama game, the very same era).

Basically GC was a fantastic machine, but launched little too late just when PS2 started to sell well after 2 years, hadn't DVD player when in 2001 started to be a must have, and the 3D GTA series was appearing just in the end of 2001 and 2002... but not for GC. Every important detail... went wrong. Some were bad decisions and some were very bad luck.
So, the PS2 sells killed the GC in its most delicate moment, during its infancy. GC had a nice launch title games, though, including the exclusive and IN-CRE-DI-BLE Star Wars Rogue Leader (those graphics seemed not from a new, but from 2 generations beyond PSX/N64). But after the first xmas, stalled. In Europe not even that, because appered in May 2002: By then? far too late to compete with PS2 and GTA series that year.
 
BUT... The Vita fail, was much more strange.

What I can clearly remember as a predicted disaster, some time before Vita, was the PSP Go. Was even more disaster that the one I was expecting. You can't just launch a digital only portable, in 2009, and expect to sell it well. To whom? PSP had basically a younger user base, people who bought games in the game stores, with physical money. People liked to buy physical games, and their internet connections were not that good to download in a moment various GBytes every time they wanted to play a game they erased from the console memory. That was the wrong horse since day 1.

BUT Vita failure (and a big one), is much more obscure. Very strange. And I don't know what happened there... Perhaps the same Sony (or part of it) boycotted that product. And i mean... on purpose. Of course, this is just a vague supposition, i have NO proof of anything, and if that was true... the reasons would be very obscure and behind the doors of that company.

But I was incredible surprised when SCEA fired Jack Treatton in 2014, just in that Vita era. Well, he officially "resigned"... but you know how those things are when you are the CEO of a big company... (and btw, Tretton was the CEO and also the President of SCEA). Some time after that, Tretton told somewhere he really wanted to promote Vita but inside Sony... didn't. Who exactly? Don't know. But apparently it ended to cost him its position. And Tretton was a VERY historical figure in SCEA: He came during the first era of the PSX, when basically SCE was funded. He was not just an "another guy", he was present during all SCEA (Playstation) history in USA, and of course, knew many people in the industry... and the industry itself as none other.

Anyways, Sony, some time after, also explicitly announced they stopped to make games for the Vita... much before its commercial death. That was another strange situation I never understood. Who does that? I can't remember Sony doing that before, neither. If a console sells bad, just... retire it from the market. All was very very rare with Vita. And they even told "the problem with Vita... was people not wanting to play portable games anymore". Just when the tablets and smartphone games were exploding as ultra popular, and just before Nintendo decided to go full for that portable market with the new Switch (its most succesful console, actually). And now... Sony tries to promote its PS Portal as a great success...? when is selling worse than Vita and is just not even a real portable console? What?

Don't know, maybe all that conspiracy is just my imagination, but... I always thought it was something not explained behind Vita's fail, And Sony has a long-known history of doing dark maneuvers inside its own studios (at least), so... who knows.

There was a weird cultural shift at the time with millennials who were becoming adolescents where everything colorful and whimsical was deemed “kiddy” and “stupid.” We just wanted gritty and gory at the time. Believe me, I lived through it and it was an incredibly stupid and judgmental time in pop culture. The GBA avoided the GC’s fate by being the system of the two that appealed more to kids/was more affordable for parents to buy kids. And even some of said adolescent millennials were ok getting a GBA as a secondary system to Ps2 or Xbox  because handhelds weren’t viewed as “legit” gaming anyways (again, stupid time in the culture). 

Well,yeaaah..., but that was not really that new. I mean... it was just an evolution from the GenX teens in the 90s. XGen teens were a lot more grunge and darker than teens in the 80s. Millennials simply adopted that... and maybe exaggerated it in a comic way, almost as a travesty. The real difference was the Millennials "got the internet" in its teen years, and that mixed amazingly bad XD.
XGens were in its 20s by then.

Original GBA seemed just a toy, like GC. But teenagers and young adults liked the Advance SP. Even its ads were more "mature" than the original GBA. That new "metallic" model helped that console to sell a lot better among a more adult audience, because it was stylish, neat, and was pretty more portable cause it could close itself (also, it had backlit screen: Original GBA did not). Can't see the original GBA selling well to many 17-23 old people, particularly the purple model (Why the hell Nintendo loved that color so much by the early 2000s? It was too childish in those years).