The thread is far from being "idiotic": even in the Gamecube area, when many "real idiots" were stating that Nintendo was going out-of-business, Nintendo's profits were higher than the ones made by Sony... thanks to Pokemon, maybe, but that's not the point... and now these profits have been increased by a 300% margin, if i remember correctly...

If you look at the current situation, you have Microsoft's gaming division still in the red after nearly 10 years in the "war", and Sony who lost nearly all the PSX-PS2 profits in the last 3 years... while Nintendo has made huge profits for the last 20 years, with no loss ever reported... if you view it that way, Nintendo has always been N°1, and is now even stronger than ever before...

So, who's "trolling" now?

Great counter argument.  Sales really are all that matters in determining who has the lead. 

Then again, sometimes who has the lead does not matter.

Awesome. It's been a while since I saw the numbers that show how Nintendo thwomped Sony during Nintendo's supposed "down years".

People should actually read the article I posted, and look at the numbers in that link. It's especially tiring to see people keep saying that the Gamecube wasn't hugely profitable for Nintendo, and that somehow they had to rely on GBA sales to "stay afloat." Nothing could be further from the truth, but sadly I guess some people here don't like to read. Or don't like facts.

In the post I linked you, if you add up Nintendo profits from 2001-2006 you get a grand total of...

$5,337,861,430 for Nintendo

For Sony's entire history you have.

$1,674,413,200. That's roughly 31% of Nintendo's profits during the Gamecube era.

Now of course the GBA was largely succesfull during this time and the DS was starting to take off, but I highly doubt that accounted for 70% of Nintendo's profits.

If Gamecube didn't outprofit Sony's game division, it was pretty damn close.

My point was how silly it was to determine how successful the console was based on profits alone ( I don't know anyone who would put the Gamecube over all of SCE).

Gamecube was a financial success but a commercial failure.

WHAT!...WHAT!? Please contemplate what you just wrote.

Those are inflation adjusted numbers. The thing is that noone uses inflation adjusted numbers in accounting reports from my basic one paper accounting knowledge from ages past.

Nintendo during that Era was selling a large quantity of Gameboy line handhelds, these are extremely cheap because they had gone through several transitions from GB -> GB Colour -> Gameboy Advance -> Gameboy Advance SP as the major changes. They likely made more money on handheld hardware than console hardware and they made more money on handheld software than console software because they had several massive Pokemon games come out in quick succession during that era.

Its a pretty big assertion that a console which only sold roughly 20M units would make up a large proportion of Nintendos earnings when the handhelds made up a massive quantity of sales and had an effective monopoly.

I cannot condone goal-post moving, even if it gives GameCube a better image in the end.

It was a tragic loss to the upstart Microsoft, and probably came in the later end of the race, due more or less to Halo 2.

Nintendo made a ton of money off the Gamecube

But, with regards to the competition, it underperformed, by A LOT, and lost most of the already slim 3rd party support.

That's what I meant by commercial failure, it failed to get a large install base.

What I meant by financial success was, obviously, Nintendo still made money.

Those terms do not mean that. The GC was a failure in marketshare. A commercial failure would be something else.