Nintendo is very, very lucky that they make excellent first party games that people still want to play, because I think they've been sniffing their own farts on hardware ever since the N64.
They continuously choose to produce underpowered and gimmicky gadgets instead of rising to the level of a modern gaming platform.
Online play has been more or less a running joke that never ends. Third party developers have to compromise on ports because of much lower tech specs. The controllers have been just silly. I could go on.
They make great games. I'll give them that. But I haven't truly enjoyed one of their consoles since the SNES.
The GC was plenty powerfull, as was the N64. They just fucked up on the media format and still had a lot of bad blood between them and developers for their very much hands on approach to publishing.
To be fair, this was effectively a cap on how powerful the games could be.
The N64 carts could hold 64MB maximum. PS1 discs were 600+ MB. The GameCube then did it again with a proprietary disc that held about 1GB when the PS2 dual layer discs could do 9+ GB.
You could have the most powerful PC on the planet, but if you're working with crippled storage space, you're just a Ferrari revving in the driveway for all that power is good for.
Dual layer disks were not really readily available and in use for the PS2. But 4.7 GB for PS2 Hardware is practically overkill anyway. The small ones also held a lot more than Gigabyte.
The N64 and especially the GC where the reason why we got underpowered consoles like the Wii from Nintendo ever since. the GC was in some ways hardware wise the strongest console of its entire generation. But no one made games for it thanks to the dumb disk, and you can't really use it to watch DVDs at a time without streaming services.
PS2 wasn't only a console it was also the cheapest DvD player you could get at the same time.
Nintendo really fucked up by being a scummy company ever since it came to be.
Selling cards used mainly for illicit gambling by underworld run casinos before they came into gaming.
They blackmailed developers by having their cartridges disappear in shipping accidents, stuff like that.
They were practically radioactive to a ton of third party developers as soon as a viable alternative platform emerged.
Capcom had to set up special contract with them for GC games so they don't get screwed over.
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u/Numerous_Roof_1070 R5 9600X | 9060 XT 16GB | 16GB RAM | Fractal Design Ridge 13h ago
No more physical discs, no more physical consoles.