Topic: Generational Analysis

[ThePerm]

Ok, iv been around these forums analizing the market forever. In 1999-2000 things were alot different. Sega was around but with only 14% of the market was largely uniportant. Nintendo was releasing less n64 games and was droughting, but alot of people still had faith in the company. Alot of people were avoiding ps2 because they knew Nintendo would have a superior powered system. You have to look at these things from the then temporal perspective. Then less then entirely expectedly and much to the chagrin to at least Nintendo(which by the way wasn't far behind in the market share...in 9/9/99 nintendo announced they had the majority market share) Around this time there were rumors of the Xbox, but no confirmation. Confirmation didn't come until january of 2000. At this time we werent sure whether Dolphin would come out relatively the same time as PS2.
Nintendo's big trump card was "we will wait and see, and for sure our hardware will be better" This puts Sony at a dissadvantage. However, the hardware card didnt work out.

Xbox spec sheets makes it look like it is vastly superior to Nintendo's system, when in theory the difference in power between the two systems is minimal. As Julian Eggebrecht has said ...you can do anything on gamecube you can do on x-box...you jsut have to figure out how to do it in a different way. This is why games like Resident Evil 4 and Star Wars: Rebel Strike, and Starfox exist on the gamecube. To remind gamers that GCN is really a hardware beast. Sadly we know that it really hasnt been taken advantage of. Back to the point.

This coming generation Nintendo will return once again to having the hardware advantage. From what i'v heard and from what i would do logically as Nintendo..is that they are devloping thrree different models of systems all designed with different pricepoint and power strategies...to counter whatever the competitors are for sure making.

I am 60% sure that most of Microsofts advantage was in its supposed power superiority...which is what drives a bulk of gamers to buy certain games. I'm sure the other %s was Halo.

So, i think at e3......the tides will change. That is if Nintendo does have the beast of the hardware..aned does offer something revolutionary...rather then gimmicky.

[Ian Sane]

One thing that really got me psyched about the upcoming Cube was at the time I thought Nintendo was back.  I thought the only reason the N64 had underperformed was because it used cartridges.  It was the result of one foolish mistake.  Now that the Cube was using discs and there was a level playing field Nintendo would start working their way back up to the top and third parties would come back.  That was obviously a very optimistic point of view but there were unknown factors that goofed everything up.  The Xbox threw a big monkeywrench in the whole thing.  If it was just the PS2 and the Gamecube the Cube would be doing much better and would get all of those third party games that currently appear on everything but the Cube.

However one thing that really surprised me Nintendo sheer incompetence.  They just screwed up all sorts of stuff that pretty much anyone with any minimal knowledge of videogames would have done differently.  The Cube revealed to me that the N64 didn't just "fail" because of the cartridges.  The cartridge problem was just one of many.  I assumed Nintendo wouldn't rip everyone off on memory cards or have such backwards ideas about third party support or be so anti-online.  Look at the demo discs issue.  I assumed the N64 had no demo discs because it was, you know, impossible to do on a cartridge system.  How were any of us to know that Nintendo actually just has a really retarded attitude about the whole demo disc concept?

So now I don't trust Nintendo anymore.  I'm not optimistic anymore.  The Cube could have EASILY have killed the Xbox but it didn't.  I imagine other people don't trust Nintendo anymore either which is going to make it harder to sell Revolutions.

The tides can still change but it requires incredible competence on the part of Nintendo (which I see no evidence that suggests that will happen) or a major screwup from one of the competitors.  I think MS might be going down the wrong path with the Xbox 2.  They're giving up a lot of their advantages.  Aside from the weaker hardware they're no longer going to be spending as much money.  Plus rumours suggest they're being overly ambitious as they want to turn the Xbox into a multimedia device.  I think they're going on their "plan" too soon.  They aren't big enough in the console market to start doing the traditional MS routine yet.

But Nintendo may majorly screw up themselves if the Revolution's big new idea flops.  If they show up at E3 with the Virtual Boy 2 they're f*cked.  I don't mean last place f*cked I mean out of the console market period f*cked. They have to luck out and hope the competition does the wrong thing while at the same time do the right thing themselves.

Nintendo's next generation will depend mostly on whether or not they show up as brilliant NES/SNES Nintendo or stupid moron N64/Gamecube Nintendo.

[nemo_83]

look at my photobucket in my signature, i put in some scetches of controllers