The Nintendo GameCube - What Happened?

the design philosophy of nintendo is so fascinating as a PS2 kid

namely, the intense way that anti-piracy directs so many of their choices

definitely relevant to me and my dissertation i tell you what

Honestly as a GameCube kid I was so surprised when I got older and realized how badly it lost that gen

Nintendo and Disney are so analogous in so many ways

the correlation between "we are violently anti-piracy to the point of cutting off our feet" and "because we want to save our work to sell your children, and your grandchildren, and also you again, but only on OUR terms" just. haunts me

BlankBlankity: I'm surprised by it now

I knew the PS2 was like. a monolith of achievement, but I didn't know that the gamecube did worse than the Xbox

YEAH it felt like every kid I knew thought the GameCube was super cool
Which, tbf, it turns out the GameCube was only popular w kids

I got the PS2 well into the Wii’s life and I felt like I missed out bad

The Cube has some STELLAR games for sure but it could not compete with the PS2 hardware

though I feel like nothing had compared with ps2 hardware but that’s a different discussion

honestly between the ps2’s amazing catalogue AND ps1 backwards compatibility it’s hard to beat

I think the thing in here that makes me feel the most like I was shot is Matt offhandedly mentioning the Saturn had like twice the amount of software on it as the N64

the power of disc

YEAH I think that was the point that Nintendo was finally like "you know, we're just gonna... NOT give a damn about hardware specs and just. lean into franchises and gimmicks harder, since we know those sink or swim regardless of specs"

and it's true

they didn't want to compete on performance or be seen using numbers like polygons in a marketing battle

exactly the lesson they learned from the n64

and yeah this does incredibly bring into the point that the GC crawled so that the DS/3DS and Wii could win the entire fucking Kentucky Derby

Nintendo honestly got lucky; a lot of old firms that got stuck up their asses about proprietary hardware and stuff didn't survive

It’s not really touched on much in this video but Nintendo had the advantage of the fact that the GB/GBA/DS really shoveled money their way when their home consoles weren’t doing so hot.

The fact the 3DS started flatlining out the gate was probably a lot of the reason why the Wii U hurt even more than it did. Even as the 3DS was having stronger years, it wasn’t quite the fallback the previous handhelds had been.

Yeah it’s a future gen but im pretty sure nintendo was on 3ds life support for the Wii U era

100%, and that life support was strong but not AS strong as the previous handhelds.

But that’s part of why they had the capital to follow up the GC with the Wii. The GBA and DS funneled so much money to them.

yeah it shocks me so much that the 3ds only sold half the amount of consoles as the ds did