I'd be shocked if Nintendo ever went third party like Sega. They are extremely profitable. The Virtual Boy is their only failure. The NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, N64 and GBA have all been very successful and profitable, and the Gamecube looks to follow the same path. Plus, in addition to selling a lot of consoles, they are arguably the best developer in the world, and make a killing off their first party games. Having them exclusive to their own system forces people to buy their consoles to play their games, which is a big advantage they'd lose going third party.

Sega went third party because they sucked from the Genesis until the Dreamcast. The DC was a great system IMO, but they had no consumer confidence after the poorly conceived, and deservingly abysmall failures, of the Sega CD, 32x and Saturn.

Actually it's because Sonic is going to the box, but the Cube isn't getting anything in return----kinda seems unbalanced doesn't it?






Here's the actual news from the May 27, 2002 issue of Sega World Weekly:

If you develop a game for one platform, you can better utilize that platform, plus, you may very well get money and free promotion from the console maker for going exclusive.

For example, I'm not sure Nintendo was the right place for Capcom to go with Resident Evil, but Nintendo has certainly been building the title up and making a much bigger deal of it than Microsoft or Sony would.

Nintindo does as well as it does only because of Japan.
Nintindo is GOD in Japan.

The DC hardly sold at all in Japan, while it had decent to good sales in the US. BUT without the Japanise market Sega couldn't keep the system going. The rest is history.

Nintindo was losing ground in Japan to Sony with the PS1/PS2 but since the GC happened the PS2 is losing ground back to Nintindo.

XBox isn't doing too hot in Japan, but Microsoft expected that so no skin of thier noses, yet. XBox was ment to be a US dominated system, Microsoft needs to hold the US strong to stay afloat in the long run. So far I don't see any problems there.




Now for me.

I own all 3 systems.
GC, XBox, and PS2.

Honestly I don't see how anyone can say the GC is better than the XBox in graphics speed sound ecx. The Gamecube stutters several times in Resedent Evil and thats with Static Cameras and what apears to be prerendered backgrounds. While on the other hand the Xbox's Halo doesn't stutter untill you get into a 40 person firefight while seeing atleast a mile into the distance, all in game polys. Not to mention sound superiority, High Definition superiority, and the classic Harddrive/Broadband supiriority argument.

PS2 is still a great system, but its not quite on par with Xbox and Gamecube.

Now what makes a system great is the games.
So what system do I play mostly?
Gamecube and Ps2.

Gamecube for Resedent Evil (on my 3rd trip through it now)
PS2 for Final Fantasy 10 (my girlfriend is hooked so we are doing it together)
As far as the Xbox goes, I've played out its library at this point. Beat JSRF, only play Halo when we have a Xbox Party (16 player halo rocks, another gold star for Xbox), and the titles I'm waiting on arn't out yet.


In the futre I see myself playing more Xbox than Gamecube tho.
Gamecube has some awesome titles coming down. Especialy Metroid Prime. But there are only 3 I'm waiting on. (Metroid, Mario, Zelda) Xbox's linup looks very well rounded with about 5 games I want, and about 20-30 that I'll buy out of curiosity. Gamecube's "B-Team" sucks arse. Thier "A-team" is top notch, but they just dont cary the "B-Team" like Sony and Xbox seem too.


Thats my 2 cents.

I don't think Sega enjoys it at all. They lost money for years, and left the hardware market because they simply could not support it.

Nintendo is unlikely to take a similar route. Sega didn't have nearly as many high-selling franchises, and they didn't have a choice. Nights, Shenmue, Jet Grind, and Panzer Dragoon together probably couldn't add up to a Zelda.

Also, unlike a certain other console, the Gamecube will actually make some money. If I had to bet on a company being out of the hardware race in the next generation, it would not be Nintendo.

Nintendo makes a lot more money off their software than their hardware. Remember nobody profits in the hardware area. Imagine if they could sell Mario to 30 million people (PS2) instead of only 3.5 million. They would make more money. Sega is finally in the black because they realized they were juggling too many things. Now they are the cats meow of developers and everybody is throwing money at them to get them to develop on their console and consumers whining if they aren't supporting their console. They are a very powerful developer at this point. Nintendo would end up being the same way. Nintendo's success in the console area has steadily decreased since the NES. The SNES wasn't as successful as the NES and the N64 wasn't as successful as the SNES. The GCN seems to be on track to doing possibly worse than the N64, although it is close.

Their profits would skyrocket if they focused on the handheld market and the software development market.

BTW: Scandal, you need to get your facts straight on the Rare information in the other thread. Do some research, the founders of Rare and not Nintendo have controlling interesting no matter how many times you try and tap dance around it!

Nintendo is supposed to make money on hardware and accessories as well as games. Since we don't know the true cost of building a Game Cube I can't confirm that.

I think the prestige of having their own console is a big part of Nintendo not doing what Sega did. As long as they are profitable they will keep releasing hardware.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Sony is the king of consoles in every market. The N64 was never particularly successful in Japan. It was never even close.

Gamecube seems designed to be a console to sell to Nintendo fans who already have a PS2 (and the kiddies, of course).

As far as the consoles go, there's really not very much difference in the hardware. We haven't seen any of the consoles pushed to their limits, so we don't know how much difference there really is.

Conker looks a hell of a lot better than Mario 64, and Final Fantasy IX looks a lot better than Final Fantasy VII. We'll see what they can come up with for all of these systems over the next couple of years.

As for the hardware, I'm not an engineer, so I can't really assess the different systems. I've read that the parallel structure of the PS2 Emotion Engine makes it the most powerful processor in any of the consoles.

I've heard that the Gamecube's super-fast 1T-SRAM and large L2 cache allows it to be the most efficient of the three consoles, wasting the fewest clock cycles.

I've also read that the XBox's RAM is set up to be allocated for different functions as necessary, allowing for potentially the best textures of any console. It also supports the most special effects on-chip.

So analyzing hardware is pretty pointless because none of us really know what we're talking about. The conventional wisdom that the XBox is most powerful, based, I suppose, on the fact that it has the fastest clock speed, may not necessarily be true.

What is clear is that these are three different platforms, and when games are developed to work across them, they won't utilize the best advantages of any of them.

Resident Evil on Gamecube is probably the most visually stunning game I've ever seen. Have you ever seen lighting like that? Did you see the fire in that game? And those character models were the most detailed I've ever seen. Better than even DOA3 and VF4. I don't know what kind of stutters you saw, because that game was rock solid. If anything, it proves that the XBox doesn't have a lock on awesome graphics (and Zelda, StarFox and Metroid will prove it some more)

Multiplatform games likely won't utilize all the neat effects supported by XBox, or, if they do, the support will be cursory, perhaps an ugly bump map on something. Meanwhile the PS2 version won't be properly optimized and the textures will be muddy and the frame rate will be inconsistant, and the Gamecube version will have lousy controls. All the best, and certainly the most polished games will be exclusive to one platform.

Which is why Sega's multiplatform approach has been to have different teams working on different platforms, but with each team more or less exclusive to one platform (with the exception of AM2, apparently).

I suspect Sonic Adventure 3 is coming to XBox because the game competes directly with Nintendo's own licenses. Sega wants to get the Gamecube-owning platform fans, but they also see the possibility that Sonic can be the best platformer on the XBox, which is worth a lot of sales.

As for the B-Lists, well, I don't have the money or the time to mess around with a lot of B-list games, and with all three consoles, I don't see why you would either.

PSX ended up with something like 5 times the user base of N64, but I think N64 ended up with as many great games, and maybe more. Nintendo's A titles kept up with Sony's, but the B-list wasn't even close. How many "Silent Hill" grade games would you miss for a "Zelda"? For me, it's quite a lot.

Perhaps because ShenmueII is being published by Microsoft?

Sounds like a bit of console envy to me.

But Shenmue is OWNED by Sega, so they have final word as to its' destination.

As for the envy comment ----I've said it before, I'll say it again-----GCN gets Sonic, X-box gets Shenmue, then Sonic gets shared with X-box but Shemue doesn't get shared with GCN----unbalanced, isn't it?

Sega has other GCN-exclusive games. This is the way the console market works. Sorry.

yeah, Homerun King, soooo lucky.

I'm just pissed because Sega is being so preferential to the X-box(Shenmue, Panzer Dragoon, JSRF, and now Sonic), and giving GCN crap(Home Run King) (SMB excluded)

However I believe MS is actually publishing Shenmue for the X-Box much like THQ is publishing all the GBA games that Sega makes. How do I come to that conclusion you ask? Well, Shenmue II was shown in Microsoft's part of E3, not Sega's.

As for Sega's lean toward X-Box, this is a bit of a stretch in logic. I will agree that Smilebit seems to be all X-Box all the time (JSRF, Panzer Dragoon Orta, GunValkyrie, etc.), but Wow, Amusement Vision and Overworks seem to be pro-GC. Sonic Team is going to play the line because, honestly, they want the largest base of sells. AM2 also seems to be treading the line that Sonic Team is, but with less of a multi-platform swing. VF4 came out for PS2, VF RPG will come out for GC and Shenmue II comes out for X-Box.

You can't think overall about SEGA, because that is just a brand name. Instead you need to think of each of the teams under the Sega umbrella (Sonic Team, AM2, Overworks, WOW, Visual Concepts, Smilebit, Amusement Vision and I forget the others) that used to be AM1-8. Each one seems to run their own ship and has the ability to decide which console their games go to.

Welcome to Sega's 3rd party plan. In order to experience all the greatness they make, you need to have at least the GC and X-Box, but I would argue you need all 3 systems. There is no voodoo going on because you are comparing Sonic Team to AM2, Sega's top 2 companies...however, they are companies that do not overlap in developers or manpower.

This is a great point. I'm sure I read last year that Sega was intentionally splitting their developers up to give each console some exclusives. I think they have been very fair to the Game Cube and Xbox. If anything the PS2 has gotten the short end, but they did get the amazing Virtua Fighter 4.

You have to expect Sonic Team to go multiconsole though. They are Sega's premiere developer and Sonic is their mascot. He's going to make big money for Sega and they really need him on all three consoles.

It sucks that Game Cube owners miss out (or at least have a long wait) on great stuff like Panzer Dragoon, Shenmue, etc, but that is one of the drawbacks in a multiconsole world if you don't have them all.