Everyone makes mistakes and game console makers are not above this. It's easy to nitpick the consoles for all of the various little faults they have but what was their biggest mistake though? These are the major issues I'm talking about here, not lack of HD resolutions or HDVD. I'll take a stab at this and focus on the #1 epic failings of the current "next gen" consoles.

Nintendo and their Wii: The biggest mistake Nintendo made with this little sales wonder is something they have struggled to solve and have only recently put a band-aid on - internal storage. Nintendo seemed to put all their focus on the controls and did not think that the unit would be so popular in my opinion. They have been leaving money on the table ever since they launched the first box by not providing a storage solution for sizable amounts of DLC. Of course there are cost restraints and size limitations but clearly this is a wanted feature. I cannot understand why they didn't even provide a modest laptop drive in the unit. Even if this added $50 to the machine, it would have made for a better package and they would have sold just as much.

Microsoft's Xbox 360: This is an easy one: the rush to market. In an effort to beat Sony to market with the next generation of console, Microsoft launched a faulty console that was prone to failures. This failure is in the monumental fail category as it has cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars - this is big money I'm talking about here when the typical console will sell at a loss during the first few years of its life-cycle. The RROD was a huge and still continuing issue that has plagued gamers and Microsoft's PR department for years now. While they have issued several changes inside the box to help mitigate the problem, they will never live down this blunder.

Sony's PlayStation 3: Just like Microsoft, Sony's PS3 error is easy to point out - price. In a typical Sony fashion, the company was hell bent on providing a package that was a technical powerhouse and a boundary pusher. From the graphics engine to the Blu-ray, the PS3 was packed full of top-of-the-line ingredients. This helped push the starting price tag into unheard of regions. It seems silly to think that the PS3 is expensive now at $399 when it used to sell at $499 or even $599 for the 60GB version. Sony really banked on the PlayStation brand coupled with their new Blu-ray drive to sell these units and were met with utter defeat when compared to their rivals. It's not even that Sony was making a ton of money on these units, in fact, according to some numbers, the costs were nearly double the retail prices. If Sony would have tempered their console dream-machine with a little bit of modesty and a better gauge of the gaming market, we could have had a unit almost as good (not that we would have known the difference) with a much lower price.

Original Article: http://www.altplusf4.com/index.php/200908032219/Featured/the-biggest-blunders-of-this-generations-consoles.html

Tell me what you guys think.

DISCUSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Well, the new Xbox's have a fail rate of about the same as the PS3.

with the SD card update that Nintendo implemented I dont think storage is an issue anymore, I have a 2GB SD card and tons of console, VC and WW games and its fine

I doubt that. The PS3 has a reported failure rate of less than 1%. I just read it today from several different sources.

Dont take this the wrong way, but any proof of that? I find it really hard to belive.

If OP wrote this back in Dec '06, then I'd agree with it.

The only one I think there's universal agreement on is the PS3's price... Nintendo's storage is now a non issue because of SD support and because no downloadable games will approach anything near the size of stuff on XBL and PSN since the Wii isn't an HD system.

As for Microsoft... their "rush to market" is what allowed them to get a much needed jump ahead of Sony this generation, and their increased market share allowed them to snatch up some big titles that were once Sony-exclusive like GTAIV and FFXII. If anything, the 360s biggest problem was that it wasn't designed as well as it should have been in an effort to cut corners and costs.

360 - Speed of the dashboard...
PS3 - The console has yet to really live up to the hype... Multiplatform games are the same with very few exceptions, features and games are announced years before they actually ship, and many of the hyped saviours turned out to be phantoms... Home, LBP, KZ2, etc.
Wii - LastGen hardware with a NextGen controller and AAA 3rd party support.

wii - no storage untill recently,lack of good 3rd party support, not enough efforting in trying to get more games for its system
360 - too quick to market, shutting down some of its 1st party studios,and not buying some new studios to compete against sony and nintendo.
ps3 - price,thinking that their brand name will sell their system no matter the price,horrible motion controls included in their controller,no rumble support at launch,no trophies shortly after launch,home was pushed out way too early.

Nintendo's problem is mostly their lethargic response to their various problems. For better or worse, Nintendo is unwilling to play ball with 3rd parties and with the media on a regular basis, they haven't responded at all to any criticisms about their online model, it took them over two years to get together a fix that easily could have been there day one. Their games have often lacked obvious features, and their release patterns indicate that they desperately need more development capacity

Basically, Nintendo's problem today is their problem of all time, their utter stubborness and conservativism, which stands at a strange contradiction with their constant, genre-bending and market-creating innovation.

Microsoft's problem is dead on, but Sony's is off a little. Yeah, it cost too much, but why? The answer to that is Feature Creep. They tried putting too much in the PlayStation 3, much of it unnecessary, and which has kept them mired behind Microsoft constantly.

No it's not.  Don't make up crazy stuff.