DBWI-Nintendo stays in the home console market

I just got a brand-new Nintendo 3DS. This thing is awesome. Glasses-free 3D aside, the graphics are a blast. They remind me of the Gamecube. That got me thinking-what if Nintendo hadn't withdrew from the home console market after the failure of the Gamecube to concentrate on the handheld console market?
 
I just got a brand-new Nintendo 3DS. This thing is awesome. Glasses-free 3D aside, the graphics are a blast. They remind me of the Gamecube. That got me thinking-what if Nintendo hadn't withdrew from the home console market after the failure of the Gamecube to concentrate on the handheld console market?

There was a good chance they'd have failed anyway. As popular as video games are today, there's still only so much room in the market, and any time we go past two major systems and one third dog in the race, someone suffers. Sample equation: Atari+ColecoVision+Intellivision+Vectrex+Odyssey2=crash.

Microsoft hit the stage with a bang, and Sony was the acknowledged leader in the sixth generation. That meant that either Nintendo or Sega were screwed. I can't imagine all four companies having made it through that era, so someone was going down, and I'll be honest, it's probably just dumb luck for Sega that Nintendo bailed out first. Dreamcast 2 was really what made Sega a major player again in the home console market, and if Nintendo had stuck to its guns and kept going despite Gamecube's failure, I don't know that the market share would have been there for either company to mount a fight against Microsoft and Sony in the seventh generation.
 
what about the Wii guys?

OOC: Abby, this is a DBWI, a Double-Blind What If. The concept of a DBWI is that we are examining our timeline as a what if, essentially in character as people in an alternate time line. The goal is to explore the alternate timeline not through direct questioning or storytelling, but by inferring from the subtext of the people's posts what the differences in that timeline would be. The primary rule is, wherever possible, don't contradict factual points made by someone further up the thread, as we're trying to build a coherent universe out of it. (Things that are opinion-based are okay to disagree on, but the facts have to stay factual.)

In this timeline, Nintendo bails out of the home console market to focus on handhelds after the Gamecube fails. Comments thereafter are intended to explore why that happened, and what effects it had.
 
OOC: Abby, this is a DBWI, a Double-Blind What If. The concept of a DBWI is that we are examining our timeline as a what if, essentially in character as people in an alternate time line. The goal is to explore the alternate timeline not through direct questioning or storytelling, but by inferring from the subtext of the people's posts what the differences in that timeline would be. The primary rule is, wherever possible, don't contradict factual points made by someone further up the thread, as we're trying to build a coherent universe out of it. (Things that are opinion-based are okay to disagree on, but the facts have to stay factual.)

In this timeline, Nintendo bails out of the home console market to focus on handhelds after the Gamecube fails. Comments thereafter are intended to explore why that happened, and what effects it had.


ohh thanks for explaning. im a newbie here. lol.


well on the theard. if Nintendo did not bail out. I heard that they were thinking about a motion sensored console. how baddass would have that been? if that didnt happen (they bail out) we might have gotten that. and more Mario games.
 
if Nintendo did not bail out. I heard that they were thinking about a motion sensored console. how baddass would have that been? if that didnt happen (they bail out) we might have gotten that. and more Mario games.

Well, Sony's going to have that in the Playstation Arc due out this Christmas season. It uses some of the same accelerometer technology that's found in smartphones like the Apple iPhone and HP Impaq. They were talking about sensing the motion using some camera on the console itself, but they decided the technology just wasn't there yet, and accelerometers are getting pretty good these days.
 
Well, Sony's going to have that in the Playstation Arc due out this Christmas season. It uses some of the same accelerometer technology that's found in smartphones like the Apple iPhone and HP Impaq. They were talking about sensing the motion using some camera on the console itself, but they decided the technology just wasn't there yet, and accelerometers are getting pretty good these days.

True. And I'll be honest, I can't imagine trusting Nintendo to do it right over Sony. If the failure of the Gamecube (and, for that matter, the current success of the 3DS) proved one thing, it's that Nintendo gets far too enamored of their consoles' "gimmick," and is willing to put it in everything, even where it doesn't belong. It works with the 3DS, because the extra dimension of the image doesn't interfere with the playing of the game in most cases. Motion sensors, though? The last thing I'd want to be doing is swinging my controller around like a sword or a baseball bat. That's a recipe for a broken TV, an angry family, and a very expensive trip to Circuit City.
 
True. And I'll be honest, I can't imagine trusting Nintendo to do it right over Sony. If the failure of the Gamecube (and, for that matter, the current success of the 3DS) proved one thing, it's that Nintendo gets far too enamored of their consoles' "gimmick," and is willing to put it in everything, even where it doesn't belong. It works with the 3DS, because the extra dimension of the image doesn't interfere with the playing of the game in most cases. Motion sensors, though? The last thing I'd want to be doing is swinging my controller around like a sword or a baseball bat. That's a recipe for a broken TV, an angry family, and a very expensive trip to Circuit City.

Forgive me for not remembering, but just what was the Gamecube's gimmick?
 
Forgive me for not remembering, but just what was the Gamecube's gimmick?

That damn fool camera stick. Nothing better for gaming, especially the quick-twitch games, than having to take your thumb off the buttons and switching to the stick, rotating the image around in what was intended to be their first attempt at 3D to find out where the traps were, or the clue for a puzzle, or whatever the hell they were trying to hide on the ceiling of the map you were in. It wouldn't have been so bad in games like Eternal Dusk, which played so much like Myst, but come on. That was the absolute last thing you had time for in Smash Bros. Whip the stick around, and all you were doing was letting someone wallop you while you were looking through the damn grass for a Pokéball.

(OOC: Ha! After all this time, I finally found a use for that C stick: destroying Nintendo's market share. :p)
 
Frankly, to get Nintendo to stay in the living room past the Gamecube, they should have not made the boneheaded descision to stick to cartridges for the Nintendo64. The original analog control stick was a groundbreaker at the time, and the graphics were second-to-none, but without a large enough medium or RAM capacity, the result was either rediculously short draw-in, textures unworthy of the hardware, or pathetically short games. Forcing the sound to run off the CPU didn't help matters, either.

I mean, compare Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time to King's Field III or Ico, or Excitebike 64 to either Gran Turismo title.

Of course, I suppose that it would have been tough to have had to compete with the Sega Moebius, with its shader-model GPU by Adapteva and its implementation of the Traveler handheld system (with its three analog sticks and touch screen) as the system's controller, wouldn't it have?
 
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