Was the Gamecube a Failure?

[Russam5354]

Was it? Post your opinion here.

[P]

It had lots of great titles so it was absolutely not a failure. But from an economical perspective I understand that it did quite poorly compared to all other major Nintendo consoles.

[FamicomRetroGamer]

It depends. It didn't stand up to PS2 sales but in its own it was pretty awesome and people still buy its Top 10 games very often from eBay keeping the prices with a fix.

I own Twilight Princess NGC edition but if it were now I probably wouldn't buy it, I just did it because I wanted to own it rather than Wii's version.

On Amazon it costs like £55 used eesh and I paid around £33 for it.

[zmaster18]

Hell no! I grew up when the Gamecube was new and loved everything about it. There were sooo many classic games for it. I don't really consider any Nintendo console a failure, except for the Virtual Boy 

[nurd]

No.

[L___E___T]

It really depends on what you're judging the success against.

It nearly bankrupted Nintendo, so commercially speaking, yes it was a failure.

HOWEVER, many amazing games were made for the system - so of course in historical terms it was not a failure, it was anything but.

If it were not for Gamecube we wouldn't have had Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Sunshine or Wind Waker, all amazing games.

I actually bought a brand new one for Rockman .EXE Transmission upon release, a really great game if you can find it.

[NintendoKing]

Hell no! I grew up when the Gamecube was new and loved everything about it. There were sooo many classic games for it. I don't really consider any Nintendo console a failure, except for the Virtual Boy  

People always think Virtual Boy was a failure but it wasn't, it sold 750k units in one year; then Nintendo wanted to focus resources to Nintendo 64. So they dropped the price to liquidate the rest, people often misunderstand VB because of this fact.  
Even Miyamoto thinks VB was successful, they could have continued it with more success but simply thought from a business standpoint that focusing on N64 was of a higher importance. Besides original Gameboy was still dominating the handhelds and people thought VB was a peripheral for Gameboy rather then it's own system.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/106748-Miyamoto-Virtual-Boy-Not-a-Failure-Just-Misunderstood

[FamicomRetroGamer]

VB was worse than watching anything in 3D glasses and what's worse is that there was a company that tried to imitate Nintendo's VB with their Tiger R-Zone (credits to AVGN for letting the world know about it).

[P]

Did the Virtual Boy break even? I'm no economist, but If not it's a commercial failure right?

[L___E___T]

Of course it didn't break even, don't be too influenced by the PR spin of the Miyamoto piece - the VB was a staggering commercial failure for Nintendo.  So much so, that Yokoi left - this is unusual for Japanese companies, you usually get shuffled off to a quieter smaller desk job.

760K units in a year is not successful (especially if losing money on each one!) when you factor in the R&D cost, the lack of games sold, which is the real measure of success.  Nintendo would have sold each VB for a profit (unlike usual practice today) but the software side of it is where the money is.  Nintendo would have had a cut on every game sold.  Look at how quickly 3rd party support evaporated and you have your true answer.

Nintendo would never deliberately drop a system in under a year that was supposed to keep going for much longer, unless they  were forced to.  They've supported more than one system before with no trouble, the N64 point is more that they stopped trying to save the VB and diverted that added attention to making the N64 a success.

[iStreet]

VB was worse than watching anything in 3D glasses and what's worse is that there was a company that tried to imitate Nintendo's VB with their Tiger R-Zone (credits to AVGN for letting the world know about it).

This morning i watched the episode of AVGN with that TigerR .... What a piece of junk is that Tiger R.. haha

[P]

Yeah that thing is more than just a commercial failure...

Of course it didn't break even, don't be too influenced by the PR spin of the Miyamoto piece - the VB was a staggering commercial failure for Nintendo.  So much so, that Yokoi left - this is unusual for Japanese companies, you usually get shuffled off to a quieter smaller desk job.

760K units in a year is not successful (especially if losing money on each one!) when you factor in the R&D cost, the lack of games sold, which is the real measure of success.  Nintendo would have sold each VB for a profit (unlike usual practice today) but the software side of it is where the money is.  Nintendo would have had a cut on every game sold.  Look at how quickly 3rd party support evaporated and you have your true answer.

Nintendo would never deliberately drop a system in under a year that was supposed to keep going for much longer, unless they  were forced to.  They've supported more than one system before with no trouble, the N64 point is more that they stopped trying to save the VB and diverted that added attention to making the N64 a success.

I didn't know Yokoi was forced to leave Nintendo.

And that about them focusing more on the development of the Nintendo 64, I'm sure I read that, that it happened under the development of the Virtual Boy, not when it was already out.