Famitsu on next gen survey

[cthellis42]

1999-2001 all over again, aren't you excited?

We'll survive the massacre just fine.

As if 2002-2004 was really any different.

 

[Akumajou]

Your post was ok up until that part... What on earth would Nintendo care about what movie people would play on their GC if it had DVD features??? So, parents would actually go out and sue Nintendo cause their son played porn DVD on his GC?
I've never heard of parents suing Sony or MS or Panasonic or Philips or JVC or any other company becasue "their son was watching porn on their DVD players"...
Remember, there IS a GC with DVD capabilities. It never made it out of Japan, sadly.

I know, I almost purchased the console as I held it in my hands at a local import shop, however that is not the point because that is just an optional console, not a standard medium.

One example I could give is that having a standard DVD sized media would have allowed devs to have a game with lots of FMV scenes for alternate endings and dramatic events, something devs only had a choice with PS2 and XBox.

Are you asking me in MS could do that? How would i know? If Sony could do it less than 10 years ago, many others could, with the right attitude and vision. MS obviously entered this market witht he wrong attitude, as we have all seen.

Agreed, as much as I like XBox, MS had no clue and I am almost thinking that the gamers they hired or used as focus groups were all raised on Atari 2600s.

True. And today's not all that different. Remember, we're talking about the casual gamers who do not know what a pixel shader is.

Right.

PDO is exclusive, and Xbox has a few arcade exclusives. Obviously having more games, from Sega too, would have "helped". The point was, would it be enough for the Xbox to actually make its mark and take a significant share of the market from Sony? That's arguable, out of all the latest Sega titles, i can only see very few that would have "sold systems". They might be good games, but not system sellers. Especially the latest Sonic titles, very underwhelming, but then again, the Sonic franchise hasn't been great since the Genesis days.

I personally never like multi console ports and I feel that is why the last Sonic title was very underwhelming but then again I feel that the Sonic franchise hasn't been as great since the Dreamcast days in the sense that those two games made were at least faithfull to the classic games just like Mario 64 was for previous Mario games.

That and since DC could never get momentum with the impending Sony PS2 hype, SEGA never had a chance.

Well that's obvious. Who likes Sega games will buy the systems where they can play Sega games.

The point was, would it be enough to "beat Sony"? That's the discussion here.

No, it would have helped Microsoft's XBox but it would not beat Sony because of the legions of Final Fantasy fans, who tend to be Square fans and also probably Enix Dragon Quest fans.

However at one point during Virtua Fighter 2's huge arcade popularity during 94, 95 and 96 Japan, millions of Saturns and VF 2 copies were sold in that country prompting an Anime series, the not as well liked VF3 sequel and many years later to try to recapture that old magic, SEGA made VF4 to bring back VF2 fans.

SEGA has made alot of very great RPGs but due to their low console sales in Japan, someone familiar with Final Fantasy 5 may not be as familiar with Phantasy Star 4 during the SNES/Gen days, Panzer Dragoon Saga was almost completely ignored due to gamer apathy and Skies of Arcadia was swallowed up in the hype for Final Fantasy 9 in both Japan and the US and probably Europe too.

As a matter of fact when it comes to RPGs in Japan (biggest sellers), most only seem to remember Square Final Fantasy and Enix Dragon Quest in the top 2 slots followed by the same two later merged company list since NES or Famicom was very popular in Japan that those games established themselves as dynasties that except for Enix has been able to establish a base in the US and Europe and other territories.

And I say that with my opinion being that other devs (neither being SquarEnix) have made some really good, great and better than FF RPGs but they never got recognized due to fan person/group apathy of always, probably saying "oh this game is good by its a wannabe or not as good as FF"

Very few outside of Japan enjoyed Virtua Fighter, Virtual On, Fighting Vipers, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Panzer series, Shining series, Nights into Dreams, Burning Rangers, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Cop, Shinobi, The House of the Dead series, etc as people have enjoyed PS2 games but even then, IMO most PS2 games don't really reach mass appeal unless they fall into a couple of the current trend categories:

Final Fantasy like or SquarEnix game

Metal Gear Solid like or maybe Silent Hill like

GTA like

or the Blasto/Jak/Rachet&Clank/Crash Bandicoot/Spiro Dragon field.

Basically with so many PS2 games in the so many installed user base field of PS2, alot of good games will still get swallowed up in the path of the established watermark games decreed by some magazine that decides what get to grace a cover.

 

[GameCat]

I don't really have high hopes for this thread but since no one has posted them, here are the December NPD hardware numbers (no DS or GBA numbers as of yet):

Xbox: 1,044,000
PS2: 989,000
Gamecube: 814,000

Surprisingly good numbers for the cube, it's still kicking To be fair though, these numbers are probably heavily affected by PS2 and to some degree, Xbox, shortages.

 

[cthellis42]

Interesting. December 2003's numbers were:

Xbox: 1,080,000
PS2: 1,940,000
Gamecube: 1,160,000

The shortages can certainly be seen, but sadly it'd be hard to quantify exactly.

 

[Teasy]

GameCat

Where did you get those NPD numbers?

 

[hovz]

I don't really have high hopes for this thread but since no one has posted them, here are the December NPD hardware numbers (no DS or GBA numbers as of yet):

Xbox: 1,044,000
PS2: 989,000
Gamecube: 814,000

Surprisingly good numbers for the cube, it's still kicking To be fair though, these numbers are probably heavily affected by PS2 and to some degree, Xbox, shortages.

yep gamecube right where it belongs

 

[GameCat]

gaming-age originally but they've since been verified by a gamasutra news piece.

 

[London Geezer]

Wow, so in total, that's less than half the amount of consoles sold last year. For Christmas.

Guess it's one of the signs of an ending generation, and a good sign cause new hardware will come out soon. Thank god.

 

[Teasy]

GC did very well there, 29% of ther market in December. Especially considering some people here believe that everyone who wanted a GC already owned one. Apparently 814,000 people in the U.S alone disagreed with that in December

One thing that I wonder is where did the huge increase for December come from for GC? I mean of course everything sells better in December. But if you look at the increase in sales from November to December for all three systems GC's increase is way out of line with the other two:

GC -- 135%
XBx - 48%
PS2 - 42%

As mentioned console shortages may have limited PS2 a bit, but even so..

Hovz

Some advice, if your aim is to be banned then by all means keep doing what you're doing.

 

[Teasy]

Wow, so in total, that's less than half the amount of consoles sold last year. For Christmas.

2,847,000 in 2004 vs 4,180,000 in 2003. So not less then half, but still significantly less.

 

[Fox5]

Sigh if online was such a huge deal this generation we'd all be talking about the dreamcast being the number one console with the xbox following that and the ps2 a distant third .


Fact of the matter is it wasn't important and most likely wont be next generation .

The dreamcast unlike the ps2 had online play right out of the box . The dreamcast to this day still has an equal library of online games compared to that of the ps2 .

It seems to me that nintendos online strategy was the same as sonys. Both had add in nic cards , both left the majority of online support to 3rd party companys . The reason why sony has more online games is because there are more 3rd party developers for them.

Seems to be a bit more than that, why do online games on ps2 get ported to gamecube without online? They don't even provide LAN support.

Now lets say MS would have bought SEGA and all of those SEGA prototype Dreamcast games became exclusive XBox titles, then add to that SEGA's library of Arcade games to port as exclusives to XBox and pretty much the XBox would have been swamped with so many SEGA titles, many a fan would have just slapped a SEGA sticker on their XBox consoles.

For about the first year or so just about every sega game was exclusive to xbox or available for it. I think the only noteworthy exceptions were super monkey ball and virtua fighter 4.

I personally never like multi console ports and I feel that is why the last Sonic title was very underwhelming but then again I feel that the Sonic franchise hasn't been as great since the Dreamcast days in the sense that those two games made were at least faithfull to the classic games just like Mario 64 was for previous Mario games.

The Sonic Adventures had a lot of gameplay not faithful to sonic, like whenever you didn't play as a hedgehog.(ok, SA1 was a bit more faithful than that) All the SA games really showed was that 2d gameplay translated to a 3d world doesn't work well, the same thing that killed many franchises going from 16bit to 32bit. BTW, mario 64 was nothing like the previous marios other than being good. It introduced non linear worlds with actual objectives, no longer was it "Run to the right while jumping on things." SA changed the 2d formula to "run foward while jumping on things." The Sonic Advance series seemed a little wierd to me though, it no longer had just the straight foward focus of the old 2d sonics, but rather tried to copy a 3d game's exploration. While it was impressive how massive the levels were I didn't like it, they greatly slowed down the pace of the game and the levels seemed less refined than the old sonics. The original sonic was fairly slow paced too, though far more linear, but I didn't like the original sonic all that much either.

Ok, I feel like focusing on sonic a bit more...
I always considered sonic 3 and knuckles to be the best games in the sonic series, and they were also the most linear, had the most unique levels, and were the most story driven. I felt the sonic adventures were the closest to these games, while sonic heroes was closest to sonic 2. It had you going around at incredible speeds through large, but boring and uninspired levels. Sonic Advance seems more like Knuckles Chaotix, no fun when you just blow through the level, but taking your time and exploring is just not what you're looking for in a sonic game.

 

[see colon]

One thing that I wonder is where did the huge increase for December come from for GC?

the mario kart bundle was a rediculous deal.
msrp of mario kart DD bundle $99.99USD and includes

mario kart DD                                  msrp $ 49.99
$15 "youve got money"* voucher                value $ 15.00
"limited edition"** platinum GC                msrp $ 99.99
                                              +___________
                                     total value    $164.98

or, if you look at it another way, if you are going to buy mario kart anyway, and you pick up another game at the same time (to use that $15 coupon) you're only spending $35 on the hardware.



*$15 off any nintendo game
**so limited it's been available for 2 1/2 years

 

[Fox5]

Too bad gamecube doesn't include the broadband adapter or have more LAN games, or I'd pick up the 2nd gamecube for LAN play.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

One thing that I wonder is where did the huge increase for December come from for GC?

the mario kart bundle was a rediculous deal.
msrp of mario kart DD bundle $99.99USD and includes

mario kart DD msrp $ 49.99
$15 "youve got money"* voucher value $ 15.00
"limited edition"** platinum GC msrp $ 99.99
+___________
total value $164.98

or, if you look at it another way, if you are going to buy mario kart anyway, and you pick up another game at the same time (to use that $15 coupon) you're only spending $35 on the hardware.



*$15 off any nintendo game
**so limited it's been available for 2 1/2 years

They still made profit on those bundles mind.

 

[GameCat]

Well, Mario Kart sold pretty well last december (number one although the competition was pretty weak IIRC) and the states had the bundle with a platinum GCN, two controllers and Mario Kart for this decemebr so that probably contributed. Also, december is really different from the rest of the year, more non-game savvy relatives and parents looking for gifts so that might have contributed as well. Lots of older games like Wind waker and Smash Brothers did very well for Nintendo as well so maybe the low price , high value thing factored in as well, I dunno.

 

[Fox5]

One thing that I wonder is where did the huge increase for December come from for GC?

the mario kart bundle was a rediculous deal.
msrp of mario kart DD bundle $99.99USD and includes

mario kart DD msrp $ 49.99
$15 "youve got money"* voucher value $ 15.00
"limited edition"** platinum GC msrp $ 99.99
+___________
total value $164.98

or, if you look at it another way, if you are going to buy mario kart anyway, and you pick up another game at the same time (to use that $15 coupon) you're only spending $35 on the hardware.



*$15 off any nintendo game
**so limited it's been available for 2 1/2 years

They still made profit on those bundles mind.

Mario Kart is a first party nintendo game that I believe is already a million seller, they can give it away for free without it costing anything more than the production of the disk and case.

What was really crazy was that some stores were selling that bundle for $50 and throwing in a wavebird, but maybe that was a typo in an ad on sear's part.

 

[Ty]

Teasy,

How can you say the GCN did great? Maybe compared to itself but compared to the other two, it's still behind by ~20% (even with this surge that could likely peter out). These numbers seem to indicate that the GCN could very well be in 3rd place.

 

[Qroach]

Teasy,

As mentioned console shortages may have limited PS2 a bit, but even so..

There were xbox shortages for PS2 AND xbox in north america (also europe but we're not talking abotu that here). If you need proof of that just have a look at the noth american retails chains compaing how thie rsales were down this year due to shortages of xbox and PS2. As far I I've seen the GC didn't have tha tissue this fall.

 

[see colon]

As far I I've seen the GC didn't have tha tissue this fall.

there were some DS shortages. and my local eb sold out of cubes this giftmas, something they haven't done since launch.

These numbers seem to indicate that the GCN could very well be in 3rd place

while i won't even argue where the gc is "place" wise because i think it's quite irrelevant (the ps2 has them beat by more than a factor of 4), these numbers are for north america only. the xbox is definatly leading the cube in the west, and the cube is leading the box in the east

 

[Fox5]

As far I I've seen the GC didn't have tha tissue this fall.

there were some DS shortages. and my local eb sold out of cubes this giftmas, something they haven't done since launch.

These numbers seem to indicate that the GCN could very well be in 3rd place

while i won't even argue where the gc is "place" wise because i think it's quite irrelevant (the ps2 has them beat by more than a factor of 4), these numbers are for north america only. the xbox is definatly leading the cube in the west, and the cube is leading the box in the east

And in the middle they both lose to each other! Oh wait, I mean they tie.

BTW, it seems so strange that the gamecube would have such a weak prescence in North America when the n64 had such a strong one, in fact I believe NA is where the n64 did best. It also seemed to be where nintendo pushed the system the hardest though, it had the lowest prices and got the most big budget games. Eh, maybe n64 just had the fps-shooter crowd a few years ago(I always thought it had the multiplayer crowd in general though) while now the xbox has the fps-shooter crowd. Oh, and both systems appealed to those who had to have the most powerful systems, I wouldn't be surprised if n64s sales took a sharp hit when dreamcast came out.