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Sony extended that advantage with the PlayStation 2, which was backwards compatible with the PlayStation, meaning it had a massive library of 3rd-party

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.

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.