LogFAQs > #877650741

photographboy posted...

I think _AdjI_ has pretty much hit the nail on the head. The only other thing to talk about is Nintendo's handheld line, which dominated from the GameBoy right up to the DS. Then smart phones happened with tons of cheap/free games and essentially whittled support for 3DS down to a more hardcore audience.

The 3DS still sold very well (mainly thanks to Pokemon), but Nintendo's days of mobile dominance might also be over, hence their decision to unify console and mobile with the Switch (it was also to avoid having to support two platforms with games which is trickier now that games require so much work and resource to complete). It will be interesting to see what the future holds, so far the Switch seems to be doing very well...

Mobile is really a different market. There's very overlap between mobile gamers and actual gamers, especially since mobile games generally lack in depth. And 3DS sales were a lot more than Pokemon. Mario Kart 7 sold 15m~ to Pokemon XY's combined 16m. And while slots 3 & 4 are also Pokemon games (which have an advantage since people buy copies of each version), two more Super Mario games are right behind them. And even Animal Crossing sold over 10m.

As for the Switch, it's not technically meant to replace the 3DS nor could it, given the expense. Nintendo's handhelds have always partly dominated thanks to their lower price points which made them appealing to parents and casual gamers.

TheCyborgNinja posted...

Nintendo chose to do it their way rather than go with what the market wanted. This ended up with the N64 and the PS1.

Which is a silly hindsight argument.

SinisterSlay posted...

The n64 carts were a premium if you wanted 128mb. Most were 32 and 64mb. For like $30 a cart.
Meanwhile sony used regular discs, 700mb for about 10 cents each. That's a lot more game, graphics, for a lot cheaper.

Carts were nowhere near that expensive. They were more expensive than CDs, but the differential wasn't as huge. And the storage capacity was actually better than that for a N64 cart as well. iirc, a few games like RE2 on the N64 was 512MB.

SinisterSlay posted...

Short answer? Games were being made that simply couldn't be downgraded enough to run on Nintendo hardware, and that's still the case today.

Also not even remotely true, especially since the N64 had a better processor than the psx and the ps2 was by far the weakest system in its generation, far behind the xbox and gc.

kukukupo posted...

The real answer is the medium. Sony was using discs - and they were cheap as hell back then and offered large amounts of storage space.

Sony rolled the dice on cheap medium even though it was vastly inferior to the cartridges. Gaming has pretty much sucked ever since. Your bloated load times, 10 splash screens, 2 hour tutorials, and 200 unskippable cut scenes are all due to the disk format.

This is why you can go back and play an N64 and it is still great. PSX sucks because all the games are scratched up and you REALLY notice the load times now.

Yes, the CDs and hardware resulted in just massive performance issues but, because of the third-party support and willingness to carry more mature titles, the psx had an edge.

ernieforss posted...

Final Fantasy 7 coming to Sony exclusive pretty much killed the system (i know it came to pc about a year or 6 months later), but pc still were crappy back in those days.

Worth noting that FFVII came very close to appearing on the N64. Plus you're vastly overrating FFVII in general.
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