Teasy said:
Living in a sheer phantasy world must be nice...
If you want to debate What if scenarios all day, we can do it. Although I assure you in ever situation you raise in which you think you've had a point, I will personally smack it down.
The unfortuantly fact, that you probobly reaslise but won't say, is that the problem is that Sony is just to damn good. They're too damn good at marketing, they're too damn good at the buisness of sales, they're too damn good at giving people what they want.
In two generations, Sony has totally upset the balance of power in the formerly dipolar marketplace that is interactive-entertainment. The former market leaders of Nintendo & Sega are gone. They've castrated Sega and are watching them bleed to death at the hands of their allie, EA. Nintendo is a nothing more than a joke, like a confused 17th century ship at sea - deperatly trying to find solid ground after being spun into the dark unknown after the torrent of the PSx generation. Unfortunatly they don't realize the game has changed, they're nolonger where they once where, in a strange are where the people have diffrent ambitions and play by diffrient rules. Yeah, thats in Nintendo - go practice your "Pure Gaming" ideal so you get assrammed by Microsoft.
Now, away from the factual - what has happened - world. I'll now talk briefly about this hypothetical horsehit you and PC-Engine have clinged to like a fly. The postulate was:
If GC and XBox had been released at the same time as PS2 then frankly PS2 would be third right now. - Teasy
Ahh, right. Lets look at this objectivly. Fieldable technology is dependent upon Research & Development, which is rooted in underlying laws such as Moore's and the natural progression and building of knowledge. Thus, extrapolating from these simple ideas we can see that advance resembles a line plotted against time. Thus, you need causuality to be preserved and the events at point n that occured after 2001 in GC or XBox's lifespan are dependent upon what happened at the time leading upto n, say n = KPrevious Human Knowdge + [the advance leading to n]. Thus, you can't the technology and events that are present between points n and n+5 @ a period between n-5 and n. There are some substantial violations of causuality and the physics we need to concern ourselves with. Thus, you'd have to be a blooming idiot to even think about this and post it to a public board as some sort of 'Correct' postulate or even admiting that the Entire period would have been diffrent in ways that negate anything you can extract from the known, factual, period. But who needs intelligent debate or even correctness when you're argiuing based on bias?
So, lets explore this the corret way and not the back-assed way that you did. We can assume Nothing of the period post n which I've decided will be the 1st of January, 2000 for simplicity sake. Thus, we can only look at the events that conspired previously to the launch of XBox and GameCube and make ration decisions based upon them. Thus, all known trends on Xbox and Gamecube are nullified.
Hardware
Your assuming a launch date of 2000 for GC and XBox. This would change the situation drastically based on what was possible at point n*. Based off early XBox speculation dating back to late 1999 and published by Computer Gaming World - the XBox was said to have early specs based off the GeForce256 and P3 600. For argument sake, we can assume that a late 2000 launch would allow for the [stock] NV15 to be utilized. Due to time constraints between the time nVidia was selectred for the XBox (early 2000 as Jen Hsun Hung stated at the Robertson Stephens Semiconductor Conference in San Francisco, 7/2000). Thus, we can assume an nV15 based accelerator as the nV16 (speedbinned Nv15) ran too hot and would face a thermal dilema.
And then there's the Crush/nFORCE chipset.. oh boy. The first production nForce chipset was seen around late spring after being unveiled at Computex in June, 2001 IIRC. This is clearly post n launch window and would pose a serious problem for XBox. It would need to rely on something totally diffrent and off the shelf. The VIA's 694X was available, as was Intel's i815 and the venerable 440BX.
The next problem would be the RAM. Which would have been resricted to PC133 since the only DDR chip was AMD's 760 IronGate if memory serves me correctly and launched in Oct, 2000.
So now what do we have left for hardware? GeForce2 GTS, PentiumIII 600, i815 with integrated audio or external at cost, PC133, HDD.
Hardly the PS2 killer you make it out to be.
Software
Halo wouldn't have been there as we experienced it, merger happened in June of 2000. Perhaps a strait-port to XBox would have happened based of their existsing PC material. Even if it wasn't a launch title, it would have been vastly diffrient due to the very diffrent nature of the closed box it would have run on.
Debatables, but obviously:
No Halo2
No Doom3
NO Fable
et al...
Now, violating the rules and looking at the actual XBox launch, we see that it's launch would have been neutered beyond comprehension. Halo, that served as the bastion of XBox's potential wouldn't have been there. Their launch games would have been minimalor limited to PC ports done in the 6 month timeframe from June2000 to launch in Nov2000. Hardly time for ANYTHING. Atleast PS2 had it's PSX legacy and Sony name to run on; XBox is already dying and it's being pushed as the technologically superior box - imagine if you took that away!
Kaz would have declared the Console War over on Nov 18th, 2000.
Now Teasy, this was on XBox as thats what I'm most familiar with, if you want I'll do some reseach and post on Nintendo's options. But knowing their fate and relience on ATI/ArtX, it won't be pretty at all. I'd recomment we let this one drop.
*I'll be honest and don't care about GC's development history nor know it's make-up in detail, but the same trends will basically hold true.
