5 ms·

Consoles and competition

66 points by marban 4y ago

quanticle 4y ago
Sony extended that advantage with the PlayStation 2, which was backwards compatible with the PlayStation, meaning it had a massive library of 3rd-party games immediately; the newly-launched Xbox, which was basically a PC, and thus easy to develop for, made a decent showing, while Nintendo struggled with the Gamecube, which had both a non-standard controller and non-standard microdisks that once again limited the amount of content relative to the DVDs used for PlayStation 2 and Xbox (and it couldn’t function as a DVD player, either). Is that actually true? From what I remember, and what I've read, the original XBox was kind of a flop. That generation of consoles was dominated by the PS2, with the GameCube as an also-ran, mostly due to the strength of Nintendo's first-party titles and Rare's "almost first party" work. The original XBox had Halo, but I don't really remember any other really standout best sellers on that platform. Characterizing the GameCube as some kind of flop that Nintendo "struggled" with seems like a misrepresentation. It may not have been as immediately successful as the PS2, but with games like Super Smash Bros Melee and Banjo Kazooie, it had decent success, especially towards the end of that generation.
- quanticle 4y ago
  This also rings false to me: Nintendo, meanwhile, dominated the generation with the Nintendo Wii. What was interesting, though, is that 3rd-party support for the Wii was still lacking, in part because of the underpowered hardware (in contrast to previous generations): the Wii sold well because of its unique control method — which most people used to play Wii Sports — and Nintendo’s first-party titles. It was, in many respects, Nintendo’s most vertically-integrated console yet, and was incredibly successful. The Nintendo Wii did have excellent sales initially, but those sales fell off fast, as everyone who wanted a Wii for e.g. Wii Sports or Wii Fit got their consoles within a couple of years, and the severely underpowered hardware meant that the majority of games were released on the XBox 360 first, the PS3 second, and the Wii never. Meanwhile, Nintendo's normally strong first-party games struggled to integrate motion controls, so aside from gimmicky tech demos like the aforementioned Wii Sports, there really wasn't much reason to buy a Wii. It was a slightly better GameCube, that's all. If any console "dominated" that generation, it was the XBox 360.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    The Wii outsold the PS3 and the Xbox 360 by about 15 million units. [1] [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/best-selling-video-game-consoles-nintendo-playstation-ps5-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/best-selling-video-game-console...
  - smcl 4y ago
    In terms of units sold, it's actually correct. From the wikipedia page "List of best-selling game consoles"[0] I've taken the three from that generation: 1. Wii: 101.63 million 2. PS3: 87.4 million 3. Xbox 360: 84 million It's possible the Xbox 360 dominated within your friend-group or even your locale (fwiw I didn't know anyone who had a 360, my friends who had a console had a PS3) but in terms of raw sales it's edged by PS3 and obliterated by the Wii. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
    - de_keyboard 4y ago
      The 360 launched first so it was probably at a higher units sold for a few years at least.
    - someNameIG 4y ago
      Local is the biggest impact, to my understanding Xbox doesn't have much of a market share outside the English speaking world, Playstation does. Xbox 360 was a bit ahead of the PS3 in the US/Australia/UK, but not in Asia and congenital Europe.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Ahhh that makes sense - haven’t been in the Anglosphere during the period in question.
      - tmtvl 4y ago
        I seem to recall reading that the XBox doesn't sell well in Japan due to it's name: X (battsu) being bad, wrong, or "no". It's why in Japanese PlayStation games circle is confirm and x is cancel. congenital Europe Oh my.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The OG XBox was de rigeur in every dorm room in the country. Mostly for Halo, but football games and racing games and such also made a showing. The Gamecube's considered a flop because it sold worse than all their other game consoles except the (later) WiiU, which is their other major flop. At the time, it was sitting at the bottom of a not-promising trend line for Nintendo consoles (before the Wii blew that up). It also sold significantly worse than its contemporaries (XBox, PS2... better than the Dreamcast, but that hardly counts). I agree that it's a great system, in fact—the controller is, uniquely, brilliant for introducing young kids to controllers with more than a couple buttons on them, and feels great once you're used to it even for an adult, and it may be lacking in games but it's got a fair number of excellent entries in its library. It's easily my personal favorite of that generation (followed closely by the Dreamcast, actually).
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    > except the WiiU Shed a tear for Virtual Boy which, many may not know, was a thing that existed once.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I got to use it in a Wal-Mart or Toys-r-Us or something, once. I distinctly remember that the demo was tucked away on some toy aisle, not even with the other video games & consoles. They must already have realized it was a flop by the time I even saw one in the wild. I never really regarded that as a proper console, though, since it was very solo-play focused like a handheld, but it's also obviously not a portable gaming device, either. It was its own thing.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  OG XBOX was great though for XBMC media center and for pirating games. I guess for playing DVDs, too.
- mikepavone 4y ago
  The OG Xbox did sell more units than the Gamecube (~24 million vs. 21.7 million per Wikipedia anyway), but these seem close enough that it's a bit weird to classify them differently. I guess one way to justify that outlook is that Microsoft was coming from nothing in the console space, so getting to a distant 2nd place (even if only narrowly) makes for a decent start whereas the Gamecube sold fewer units than the N64 even while the home console market was growing as a whole.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Microsoft loss billions on the original Xbox especially with the ring of death recalls
    - noisem4ker 4y ago
      The RRoD plague affected the Xbox 360, if you mean that.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I would classify them differently. I mean they were both not very successful consoles, but the Xbox was at least a first effort from a new competitor. It makes sense that it was… more of a predictable learning experience. The GameCube seemed like a surprisingly poor showing from such an experienced company. But hey, hard to give them too much flack given the follow up. Guess the GameCube was a strong unexpected learning experience.
  - naet 4y ago
    Super Nintendo: 49.1 million sales Nintendo 64: 32.93 million sales Nintendo Gamecube: 22 million (PS2: 155 million, Xbox: 24 million) Nintendo Wii: 101.63 million Nintendo had very high targets for Gamecube, hoping to make up for some of the "lost ground" of the n64's weaker sales compared to its predecessor. The Xbox struggled heavily in Japan compared to Nintendo, and was a newcomer to the console scene, but still made more total sales. The Gamecube also had an extra year before Nintendo released a successor compared with the Xbox. Both came out around the same time, but the Xbox 360 was released a full year before the Nintendo Wii. Luckily for Nintendo, the Wii ended up being very popular compared to the Gamecube and sold ~5x more consoles. I think both original Xbox and Gamecube had sales targets higher than what they ended up reaching, but you could make an argument that Nintendo failed to capitalize on their previous popularity and market share and had a bigger flop.
- wcarss 4y ago
  I'm not here to disagree with you but I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube.
  - georgemcbay 4y ago
    > I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube. This is correct, and pertinent to the whole competition story Microsoft already owned Rare through most of that console generation (Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002). Despite MS owning Rare they still released a couple of Game Boy Advance Banjoo Kazooie games during this time that had already been in development prior to the acquisition, but didn't release a B-K game for Gamecube.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  There's an interesting thing in that the sales numbers and the narratives differed strongly in that generation. The Gamecube, while having sales nearly equal to the original XBox, is beloved mostly in retrospect; at the time of release the consensus between North American enthusiast press and corporate PR swung strongly in favor of "grown up" games(i.e. 90's edginess with swearing, gore, and boob) while Nintendo was still making "kiddie" stuff. Of course, plenty of folks bought Nintendo's offering anyway, but it wasn't clear what their strategy was at that point. They gained their now-standard reluctance to push graphics tech further on consoles with the Gamecube; it was a well-rounded game player, straightforward enough to develop for, and not hugely different from the others in spec, but it avoided doing really flashy graphics demos. And for the press, who had gotten used to talking about how high tech and advanced every release was, and how big the production budgets were, this was an affront. If you make smaller games with less graphics that aren't for the reviewer's specific demographic, their job is harder and needs more nuance. And so while the larger side of the market aided and abetted a "gamer" image, which was really just catering to whomever would give them more coverage - Nintendo stuck to its own plan. It could afford to; every portable system was a hit. So they started making their consoles more like their portables after the missteps of the N64(which was a graphics beast, but too hard for most developers to delve deep into). The reality, of course, was that the GCN quickly became a fixture in college dorms because it had good party games like Smash and the Mario Kart series. It was there right along with the PS2 and XBox and their exclusives, and yet when you saw interviews with game industry producers and the like, nobody at the time said "we should be more like Nintendo". They wanted a GTA or a first-person shooter with better lighting effects. And there was a xenophobic "beat Japan" angle among some in favoring Microsoft over Sony or Nintendo. In effect, they gaslit some part of the gaming audience in order to push the type of games they were making and the country that games should come from. It was only later in the 2000's with the next generation releases that critical backlash against the "grey/brown shooter" arose and Nintendo's position was championed - though not by everyone.
  - NovaVeles 4y ago
    While I don't think this was a huge factor, GC had to problem of being the middle child. Ps2 had all the games, Xbox had the highest tech. Add in DVD play back on those two and Gamecube just felt like it was stuck in the middle not doing anything amazing. Long term the games had had legs far greater than the vast majority of Ps2 and Xbox games but at the time it didn't look like it.
Tiktaalik 4y ago
It was Nintendo that created the 30% share for the platform owner that all future console owners would implement, and which Apple would set as the standard for the App Store. Is there a citation for this number? I thought I knew this whole story quite well but this is the first time I've seen someone cite the specific royalty rate Nintendo was getting. I'd always more read the generalization that Nintendo was "expensive", and Sony was "cheaper" and beyond that I got the impression that it was the reduction in costs and increases in flexibility with the shift from Nintendo made carts to cds that dominated royalty differences. (It's somewhat fuzzy to me around whether anyone was allowed to press Playstation discs or Sony reserved that right alone. I recall hearing the former but don't recall. Similarly I am under the impression that at some point Nintendo had strict control over manufacturing carts, but at some point that was loosened? Perhaps it was that Famicom carts at some point were a grab bag of manufacturers, but it all went in house with the SNES?)
- Uvix 4y ago
  Famicom carts were a free-for-all, as there was no lockout chip in the console. NES carts, and SNES/Super Famicom carts, required a CIC chip to function (or else the lockout chip in the console would prevent it from booting); this allowed Nintendo to control cartridge production. (Yes, a handful of third parties either illegally copied or figured out a way around the lockout chip for NES; but the vast majority of carts were manufactured by Nintendo themselves.)
erickhill 4y ago
I find it slightly baffling (yet predictable) that Commodore wasn't mentioned once during the transitional leap from the 2600 to "home computers." It's as if the best-selling computer of all time prior to the iPhone has been erased from history.
- somrand0 4y ago
  because this is not an analysis of computing in general. but an analysis about a specific use-case of computers in general: video games; written in response to microsoft's gobbling up of activision
  - lmm 4y ago
    Which is exactly the use case that the Commodore 64 is famous for.
Tiktaalik 4y ago
To suddenly cut Call of Duty (or Activision’s other multi-platform titles) off from Playstation would be massively value destructive; no wonder Microsoft said it was happy to sign a 10-year deal with Sony to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. It would be value destructive if all those Sony buyers decided to shrug and not buy a CoD game ever again. It wouldn't be at all if the CoD players could be lured to buy an Xbox. This article asserts that there's effectively no difference between the hardware at this point, so if we accept the article's arguments here, getting the consumers to move from Sony to Xbox with exclusives is theoretically easier than it's ever been. No wonder people are alarmed.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Considering consoles are sold basically at or below cost, getting someone to buy a console instead of just the game almost seems like a value destroyer. Either way, there surely is a large chunk of people who won’t buy multiple $500 consoles, and those sales WILL be lost of you don’t make the game for their console. I imagine it’s greater than the number of people who will buy another console.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Pardon me for asking, but are you the Vineyard Mike? Owner and Operator of The Vineyard? It's a bit off-topic and I don't mean to blow-up your spot, but I'm really curious...
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Almost certainly not the one you're thinking of.
gryson 4y ago
An important point could be added: Nintendo and Sega saw their consoles first and foremost as ways to promote their own games, which is where they profited the most. Their business model was centered on their own software. Third party publishers were seen as a necessary evil to be tightly controlled, which is why Nintendo restricted them to just 5 titles a year. The story goes that when Namco first approached Nintendo about publishing on the Famicom, Nintendo was so surprised they didn't even know what kind of terms to offer. Sony changed all of that by giving publishers a platform where they were welcomed with open arms. Third party publishers no longer had to worry (for the time being) about competing against the platform holder from a disadvantaged position. Furthermore, they didn't have to financially support their rival via licensing royalties.
Kukumber 4y ago
You know this article is bullshit when they don't mention xbox exclusives in their illustrations That's clearly a pro-microsoft PoV doing a subjective analysis of the situation
- scarface74 4y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim that Ben Thompson had an MS bias.
  - pbh101 4y ago
    I’d say he admires their strategy/business model clarity post-Nadella, both in Office/services over Windows and Xbox subscriptions. He also worked there in the past and it comes through he cares more about MSFT than your average worker in tech, but agree I don’t think it rises to level of bias. More like: I almost never think of MSFT (despite using Outlook daily) and Ben does daily.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      He also worked for Apple. But if you compare Microsoft’s model to let’s say Google’s non existent strategy, the difference is night and day. Google has the strategy and focus of a crack addled flea. Nadella came in with a vision and executed perfectly.
andrewstuart 4y ago
It's clear Microsoft aims to "win" the console battle. That would be a disaster. When Microsoft "wins", it completely gives up competing and development and rests on it's "top of the market" position - best example of the is Internet Explorer. Once it had wiped out Mozilla, Microsoft stopped development of Internet Explorer entirely. I don't see why Microsoft has to destroy Playstation. If anything, the corporate part of Microsoft seems to be going for a strategy of going cross platform everywhere and winning hearts and minds and going where the developers are, opening up, embracing open source. At the same time, Xbox seems to be veering back into the Microsoft of the 1990's, who's goal was purely to destroy everything that competes with Microsoft. I hope Xbox fail in their acquisition and they have lost substantial goodwill with me - I'm sure that matters to them. And I hope Xbox lose in their battle to destroy Playstation.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  EEE is coming along quite a bit in VSCode (though, to be fair, they made it). There are quite a few things you can't use if you're not using the official Microsoft-provided builds.
andrewstuart 4y ago
One thing not mentioned is that even if Microsoft releases games for Playstation as required by some sort of Justice Department agreement, they don't have to release at the same time, nor with the same features or quality. Call of Duty 2025 for Xbox available NOW! Coming to Playstation 4 in 2027. Microsoft in the past was shown to be a cunning and underhanded competitor and that's who Xbox is today - a nasty little backstreet knife fighter willing to hide its sharpest blades until it sticks them in. I am a real believer in the "newer, nicer Microsoft", but I don't think that includes Xbox and I would not trust their words to the Justice Department as being worth a dime.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  It's not like Sony plays much nicer. They also delay porting their games to competing platforms, The Last of Us is coming to PC in 2023... 10 years after it's original release.
  - dkersten 4y ago
    And Nintendo doesn’t bother at all. When will Mario and Zelda be released on non-Nintendo hardware? Never.
kweingar 4y ago
I have played hours and hours of Breakout. I had no idea it was designed by Steve Wozniak.
m3drano 4y ago
I entered the article expecting consoles as in terminals and it was as in games :P Worthy read, though.
pjmlp 4y ago
Mostly correct, however it also has a few made up facts. First of all Nintendo did not create a 30% fee, yes there is a fee, but it certainly wasn't 30%, rather higher. Second, 3rd party exclusives are as old as game console SDKs exist, regardless of middleware engines. Third, contrary to FOSS circles, in the game industry most studios are quite found of console exclusives, it gives them exposure in the thousands of games that get released every day, and usually better advance payments schemes to support their development costs, it also creates the market of game studios that are specialized in specific consoles knowing every detail to take the ultimate performance out of them. All consoles have some exclusive titles from 3rd parties.

66 points by marban 4y ago

Sony extended that advantage with the PlayStation 2, which was backwards compatible with the PlayStation, meaning it had a massive library of 3rd-party games immediately; the newly-launched Xbox, which was basically a PC, and thus easy to develop for, made a decent showing, while Nintendo struggled with the Gamecube, which had both a non-standard controller and non-standard microdisks that once again limited the amount of content relative to the DVDs used for PlayStation 2 and Xbox (and it couldn’t function as a DVD player, either). Is that actually true? From what I remember, and what I've read, the original XBox was kind of a flop. That generation of consoles was dominated by the PS2, with the GameCube as an also-ran, mostly due to the strength of Nintendo's first-party titles and Rare's "almost first party" work. The original XBox had Halo, but I don't really remember any other really standout best sellers on that platform. Characterizing the GameCube as some kind of flop that Nintendo "struggled" with seems like a misrepresentation. It may not have been as immediately successful as the PS2, but with games like Super Smash Bros Melee and Banjo Kazooie, it had decent success, especially towards the end of that generation.

quanticle 4y ago
This also rings false to me: Nintendo, meanwhile, dominated the generation with the Nintendo Wii. What was interesting, though, is that 3rd-party support for the Wii was still lacking, in part because of the underpowered hardware (in contrast to previous generations): the Wii sold well because of its unique control method — which most people used to play Wii Sports — and Nintendo’s first-party titles. It was, in many respects, Nintendo’s most vertically-integrated console yet, and was incredibly successful. The Nintendo Wii did have excellent sales initially, but those sales fell off fast, as everyone who wanted a Wii for e.g. Wii Sports or Wii Fit got their consoles within a couple of years, and the severely underpowered hardware meant that the majority of games were released on the XBox 360 first, the PS3 second, and the Wii never. Meanwhile, Nintendo's normally strong first-party games struggled to integrate motion controls, so aside from gimmicky tech demos like the aforementioned Wii Sports, there really wasn't much reason to buy a Wii. It was a slightly better GameCube, that's all. If any console "dominated" that generation, it was the XBox 360.
- ketzo 4y ago
  The Wii outsold the PS3 and the Xbox 360 by about 15 million units. [1] [1] https://www.ign.com/articles/best-selling-video-game-consoles-nintendo-playstation-ps5-xbox https://www.ign.com/articles/best-selling-video-game-console...
- smcl 4y ago
  In terms of units sold, it's actually correct. From the wikipedia page "List of best-selling game consoles"[0] I've taken the three from that generation: 1. Wii: 101.63 million 2. PS3: 87.4 million 3. Xbox 360: 84 million It's possible the Xbox 360 dominated within your friend-group or even your locale (fwiw I didn't know anyone who had a 360, my friends who had a console had a PS3) but in terms of raw sales it's edged by PS3 and obliterated by the Wii. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...
  - de_keyboard 4y ago
    The 360 launched first so it was probably at a higher units sold for a few years at least.
  - someNameIG 4y ago
    Local is the biggest impact, to my understanding Xbox doesn't have much of a market share outside the English speaking world, Playstation does. Xbox 360 was a bit ahead of the PS3 in the US/Australia/UK, but not in Asia and congenital Europe.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Ahhh that makes sense - haven’t been in the Anglosphere during the period in question.
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      I seem to recall reading that the XBox doesn't sell well in Japan due to it's name: X (battsu) being bad, wrong, or "no". It's why in Japanese PlayStation games circle is confirm and x is cancel. congenital Europe Oh my.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The OG XBox was de rigeur in every dorm room in the country. Mostly for Halo, but football games and racing games and such also made a showing. The Gamecube's considered a flop because it sold worse than all their other game consoles except the (later) WiiU, which is their other major flop. At the time, it was sitting at the bottom of a not-promising trend line for Nintendo consoles (before the Wii blew that up). It also sold significantly worse than its contemporaries (XBox, PS2... better than the Dreamcast, but that hardly counts). I agree that it's a great system, in fact—the controller is, uniquely, brilliant for introducing young kids to controllers with more than a couple buttons on them, and feels great once you're used to it even for an adult, and it may be lacking in games but it's got a fair number of excellent entries in its library. It's easily my personal favorite of that generation (followed closely by the Dreamcast, actually).
- highwaylights 4y ago
  > except the WiiU Shed a tear for Virtual Boy which, many may not know, was a thing that existed once.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I got to use it in a Wal-Mart or Toys-r-Us or something, once. I distinctly remember that the demo was tucked away on some toy aisle, not even with the other video games & consoles. They must already have realized it was a flop by the time I even saw one in the wild. I never really regarded that as a proper console, though, since it was very solo-play focused like a handheld, but it's also obviously not a portable gaming device, either. It was its own thing.
actionfromafar 4y ago
OG XBOX was great though for XBMC media center and for pirating games. I guess for playing DVDs, too.
mikepavone 4y ago
The OG Xbox did sell more units than the Gamecube (~24 million vs. 21.7 million per Wikipedia anyway), but these seem close enough that it's a bit weird to classify them differently. I guess one way to justify that outlook is that Microsoft was coming from nothing in the console space, so getting to a distant 2nd place (even if only narrowly) makes for a decent start whereas the Gamecube sold fewer units than the N64 even while the home console market was growing as a whole.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Microsoft loss billions on the original Xbox especially with the ring of death recalls
  - noisem4ker 4y ago
    The RRoD plague affected the Xbox 360, if you mean that.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I would classify them differently. I mean they were both not very successful consoles, but the Xbox was at least a first effort from a new competitor. It makes sense that it was… more of a predictable learning experience. The GameCube seemed like a surprisingly poor showing from such an experienced company. But hey, hard to give them too much flack given the follow up. Guess the GameCube was a strong unexpected learning experience.
- naet 4y ago
  Super Nintendo: 49.1 million sales Nintendo 64: 32.93 million sales Nintendo Gamecube: 22 million (PS2: 155 million, Xbox: 24 million) Nintendo Wii: 101.63 million Nintendo had very high targets for Gamecube, hoping to make up for some of the "lost ground" of the n64's weaker sales compared to its predecessor. The Xbox struggled heavily in Japan compared to Nintendo, and was a newcomer to the console scene, but still made more total sales. The Gamecube also had an extra year before Nintendo released a successor compared with the Xbox. Both came out around the same time, but the Xbox 360 was released a full year before the Nintendo Wii. Luckily for Nintendo, the Wii ended up being very popular compared to the Gamecube and sold ~5x more consoles. I think both original Xbox and Gamecube had sales targets higher than what they ended up reaching, but you could make an argument that Nintendo failed to capitalize on their previous popularity and market share and had a bigger flop.
wcarss 4y ago
I'm not here to disagree with you but I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube.
- georgemcbay 4y ago
  > I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube. This is correct, and pertinent to the whole competition story Microsoft already owned Rare through most of that console generation (Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002). Despite MS owning Rare they still released a couple of Game Boy Advance Banjoo Kazooie games during this time that had already been in development prior to the acquisition, but didn't release a B-K game for Gamecube.
syntheweave 4y ago
There's an interesting thing in that the sales numbers and the narratives differed strongly in that generation. The Gamecube, while having sales nearly equal to the original XBox, is beloved mostly in retrospect; at the time of release the consensus between North American enthusiast press and corporate PR swung strongly in favor of "grown up" games(i.e. 90's edginess with swearing, gore, and boob) while Nintendo was still making "kiddie" stuff. Of course, plenty of folks bought Nintendo's offering anyway, but it wasn't clear what their strategy was at that point. They gained their now-standard reluctance to push graphics tech further on consoles with the Gamecube; it was a well-rounded game player, straightforward enough to develop for, and not hugely different from the others in spec, but it avoided doing really flashy graphics demos. And for the press, who had gotten used to talking about how high tech and advanced every release was, and how big the production budgets were, this was an affront. If you make smaller games with less graphics that aren't for the reviewer's specific demographic, their job is harder and needs more nuance. And so while the larger side of the market aided and abetted a "gamer" image, which was really just catering to whomever would give them more coverage - Nintendo stuck to its own plan. It could afford to; every portable system was a hit. So they started making their consoles more like their portables after the missteps of the N64(which was a graphics beast, but too hard for most developers to delve deep into). The reality, of course, was that the GCN quickly became a fixture in college dorms because it had good party games like Smash and the Mario Kart series. It was there right along with the PS2 and XBox and their exclusives, and yet when you saw interviews with game industry producers and the like, nobody at the time said "we should be more like Nintendo". They wanted a GTA or a first-person shooter with better lighting effects. And there was a xenophobic "beat Japan" angle among some in favoring Microsoft over Sony or Nintendo. In effect, they gaslit some part of the gaming audience in order to push the type of games they were making and the country that games should come from. It was only later in the 2000's with the next generation releases that critical backlash against the "grey/brown shooter" arose and Nintendo's position was championed - though not by everyone.
- NovaVeles 4y ago
  While I don't think this was a huge factor, GC had to problem of being the middle child. Ps2 had all the games, Xbox had the highest tech. Add in DVD play back on those two and Gamecube just felt like it was stuck in the middle not doing anything amazing. Long term the games had had legs far greater than the vast majority of Ps2 and Xbox games but at the time it didn't look like it.

Tiktaalik 4y ago

It was Nintendo that created the 30% share for the platform owner that all future console owners would implement, and which Apple would set as the standard for the App Store. Is there a citation for this number? I thought I knew this whole story quite well but this is the first time I've seen someone cite the specific royalty rate Nintendo was getting. I'd always more read the generalization that Nintendo was "expensive", and Sony was "cheaper" and beyond that I got the impression that it was the reduction in costs and increases in flexibility with the shift from Nintendo made carts to cds that dominated royalty differences. (It's somewhat fuzzy to me around whether anyone was allowed to press Playstation discs or Sony reserved that right alone. I recall hearing the former but don't recall. Similarly I am under the impression that at some point Nintendo had strict control over manufacturing carts, but at some point that was loosened? Perhaps it was that Famicom carts at some point were a grab bag of manufacturers, but it all went in house with the SNES?)

Uvix 4y ago
Famicom carts were a free-for-all, as there was no lockout chip in the console. NES carts, and SNES/Super Famicom carts, required a CIC chip to function (or else the lockout chip in the console would prevent it from booting); this allowed Nintendo to control cartridge production. (Yes, a handful of third parties either illegally copied or figured out a way around the lockout chip for NES; but the vast majority of carts were manufactured by Nintendo themselves.)

erickhill 4y ago

I find it slightly baffling (yet predictable) that Commodore wasn't mentioned once during the transitional leap from the 2600 to "home computers." It's as if the best-selling computer of all time prior to the iPhone has been erased from history.

somrand0 4y ago
because this is not an analysis of computing in general. but an analysis about a specific use-case of computers in general: video games; written in response to microsoft's gobbling up of activision
- lmm 4y ago
  Which is exactly the use case that the Commodore 64 is famous for.

Tiktaalik 4y ago

To suddenly cut Call of Duty (or Activision’s other multi-platform titles) off from Playstation would be massively value destructive; no wonder Microsoft said it was happy to sign a 10-year deal with Sony to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. It would be value destructive if all those Sony buyers decided to shrug and not buy a CoD game ever again. It wouldn't be at all if the CoD players could be lured to buy an Xbox. This article asserts that there's effectively no difference between the hardware at this point, so if we accept the article's arguments here, getting the consumers to move from Sony to Xbox with exclusives is theoretically easier than it's ever been. No wonder people are alarmed.

vineyardmike 4y ago
Considering consoles are sold basically at or below cost, getting someone to buy a console instead of just the game almost seems like a value destroyer. Either way, there surely is a large chunk of people who won’t buy multiple $500 consoles, and those sales WILL be lost of you don’t make the game for their console. I imagine it’s greater than the number of people who will buy another console.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Pardon me for asking, but are you the Vineyard Mike? Owner and Operator of The Vineyard? It's a bit off-topic and I don't mean to blow-up your spot, but I'm really curious...
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Almost certainly not the one you're thinking of.

gryson 4y ago

An important point could be added: Nintendo and Sega saw their consoles first and foremost as ways to promote their own games, which is where they profited the most. Their business model was centered on their own software. Third party publishers were seen as a necessary evil to be tightly controlled, which is why Nintendo restricted them to just 5 titles a year. The story goes that when Namco first approached Nintendo about publishing on the Famicom, Nintendo was so surprised they didn't even know what kind of terms to offer. Sony changed all of that by giving publishers a platform where they were welcomed with open arms. Third party publishers no longer had to worry (for the time being) about competing against the platform holder from a disadvantaged position. Furthermore, they didn't have to financially support their rival via licensing royalties.

Kukumber 4y ago

You know this article is bullshit when they don't mention xbox exclusives in their illustrations That's clearly a pro-microsoft PoV doing a subjective analysis of the situation

scarface74 4y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim that Ben Thompson had an MS bias.
- pbh101 4y ago
  I’d say he admires their strategy/business model clarity post-Nadella, both in Office/services over Windows and Xbox subscriptions. He also worked there in the past and it comes through he cares more about MSFT than your average worker in tech, but agree I don’t think it rises to level of bias. More like: I almost never think of MSFT (despite using Outlook daily) and Ben does daily.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    He also worked for Apple. But if you compare Microsoft’s model to let’s say Google’s non existent strategy, the difference is night and day. Google has the strategy and focus of a crack addled flea. Nadella came in with a vision and executed perfectly.

andrewstuart 4y ago

It's clear Microsoft aims to "win" the console battle. That would be a disaster. When Microsoft "wins", it completely gives up competing and development and rests on it's "top of the market" position - best example of the is Internet Explorer. Once it had wiped out Mozilla, Microsoft stopped development of Internet Explorer entirely. I don't see why Microsoft has to destroy Playstation. If anything, the corporate part of Microsoft seems to be going for a strategy of going cross platform everywhere and winning hearts and minds and going where the developers are, opening up, embracing open source. At the same time, Xbox seems to be veering back into the Microsoft of the 1990's, who's goal was purely to destroy everything that competes with Microsoft. I hope Xbox fail in their acquisition and they have lost substantial goodwill with me - I'm sure that matters to them. And I hope Xbox lose in their battle to destroy Playstation.

solarkraft 4y ago
EEE is coming along quite a bit in VSCode (though, to be fair, they made it). There are quite a few things you can't use if you're not using the official Microsoft-provided builds.

andrewstuart 4y ago

One thing not mentioned is that even if Microsoft releases games for Playstation as required by some sort of Justice Department agreement, they don't have to release at the same time, nor with the same features or quality. Call of Duty 2025 for Xbox available NOW! Coming to Playstation 4 in 2027. Microsoft in the past was shown to be a cunning and underhanded competitor and that's who Xbox is today - a nasty little backstreet knife fighter willing to hide its sharpest blades until it sticks them in. I am a real believer in the "newer, nicer Microsoft", but I don't think that includes Xbox and I would not trust their words to the Justice Department as being worth a dime.

smoldesu 4y ago
It's not like Sony plays much nicer. They also delay porting their games to competing platforms, The Last of Us is coming to PC in 2023... 10 years after it's original release.
- dkersten 4y ago
  And Nintendo doesn’t bother at all. When will Mario and Zelda be released on non-Nintendo hardware? Never.

kweingar 4y ago

I have played hours and hours of Breakout. I had no idea it was designed by Steve Wozniak.

m3drano 4y ago

I entered the article expecting consoles as in terminals and it was as in games :P Worthy read, though.

pjmlp 4y ago

Mostly correct, however it also has a few made up facts. First of all Nintendo did not create a 30% fee, yes there is a fee, but it certainly wasn't 30%, rather higher. Second, 3rd party exclusives are as old as game console SDKs exist, regardless of middleware engines. Third, contrary to FOSS circles, in the game industry most studios are quite found of console exclusives, it gives them exposure in the thousands of games that get released every day, and usually better advance payments schemes to support their development costs, it also creates the market of game studios that are specialized in specific consoles knowing every detail to take the ultimate performance out of them. All consoles have some exclusive titles from 3rd parties.