Quote:
Originally Posted by CyberCubed
Gamecube only sold about 3 million consoles less than the original Xbox. Now the PS2 sold 155 million consoles so it was the clear winner, but Gamecube and Xbox were pretty close. It's only Halo and the push of online that Xbox did better. Around 21 million Gamecubes were sold compared to 24 million Xbox's.
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The difference might just have been 3 million units sold, but the Xbox had a bigger mainstream presence. You're forgetting how big Halo was back then. And also, the fact the console was made by Microsoft.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sdp
The whole Nintendo is for kids was just too much for the Gamecube, it couldn't compete with that stigma. Being a kid and liking Nintendo was like saying you liked Barney the Dinosaur. Super Nintendo was so good that despite the Sega ads of how it was cooler, it didn't work for sega to beat nintendo but it did damage that helped the Playstation over the Nintendo 64 but it was still going strong with the ineartia of the SNES. By the time the Gamecube came out it was just impossible to escape the idea that Nintendo was for kids, no matter how hard nintendo tried to market itself as the "cool kid".
Xbox was a newcomer and from a boring adult company like Microsoft. It basically only had one good exclusive game and online gaming going for it, but the millions of dollars MS dumped on marketing helped to make it sell more than Gamecube. The Nintendo brand was so Toxic the next console dropped any references to NIntendo and just called it the Wii. If you look at pre-release footage of Wii Sports it used to say "Nintendo" over the courts but they removed it and put "Wii" instead, changed their logo to silver/grey to look classy and their brand change worked and they sold millions. The Wii is really just a Gamecube with motion controls, in fact the motion controls were originally going to be an adapter for the Gamecube.
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That mentality is still alive today in parts of the world where the Super Nintendo lost to the Mega Drive... like Europe. Or Eastern Europe where video games have a different history than the rest of the continent. For a lot of Eastern Europeans, consoles did not fully establish themselves until the PS2. And they're priced out of Nintendo systems. Hell, in Poland you couldn't even find a GameCube or a Wii in major retail shops from what I've been told!
People who've never played Nintendo games or only played Pokémon on Game Boy when they were kids, tend to have the worst takes on the company, calling it "kiddy" and such. I used to think it was just bitterness of their precious Sega Mega Drive losing to the SNES, but perhaps it's more than that.