Consoles and competition | Hacker News Reader

Consoles and competition

stratechery.com

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    Sony extended that advantage with the PlayStation 2, which was backwards
    compatible with the PlayStation, meaning it had a massive library of
    3rd-party games immediately; the newly-launched Xbox, which was basically a
    PC, and thus easy to develop for, made a decent showing, while Nintendo
    struggled with the Gamecube, which had both a non-standard controller and
    non-standard microdisks that once again limited the amount of content
    relative to the DVDs used for PlayStation 2 and Xbox (and it couldn’t
    function as a DVD player, either).

Is that actually true? From what I remember, and what I've read, the original XBox was kind of a flop. That generation of consoles was dominated by the PS2, with the GameCube as an also-ran, mostly due to the strength of Nintendo's first-party titles and Rare's "almost first party" work. The original XBox had Halo, but I don't really remember any other really standout best sellers on that platform. Characterizing the GameCube as some kind of flop that Nintendo "struggled" with seems like a misrepresentation. It may not have been as immediately successful as the PS2, but with games like Super Smash Bros Melee and Banjo Kazooie, it had decent success, especially towards the end of that generation.

This also rings false to me:

    Nintendo, meanwhile, dominated the generation with the Nintendo Wii. What
    was interesting, though, is that 3rd-party support for the Wii was still
    lacking, in part because of the underpowered hardware (in contrast to
    previous generations): the Wii sold well because of its unique control
    method — which most people used to play Wii Sports — and Nintendo’s
    first-party titles. It was, in many respects, Nintendo’s most
    vertically-integrated console yet, and was incredibly successful.

The Nintendo Wii did have excellent sales initially, but those sales fell off fast, as everyone who wanted a Wii for e.g. Wii Sports or Wii Fit got their consoles within a couple of years, and the severely underpowered hardware meant that the majority of games were released on the XBox 360 first, the PS3 second, and the Wii never. Meanwhile, Nintendo's normally strong first-party games struggled to integrate motion controls, so aside from gimmicky tech demos like the aforementioned Wii Sports, there really wasn't much reason to buy a Wii. It was a slightly better GameCube, that's all. If any console "dominated" that generation, it was the XBox 360.

The Wii outsold the PS3 and the Xbox 360 by about 15 million units. [1]

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/best-selling-video-game-console...

In terms of units sold, it's actually correct. From the wikipedia page "List of best-selling game consoles"[0] I've taken the three from that generation:

1. Wii: 101.63 million

2. PS3: 87.4 million

3. Xbox 360: 84 million

It's possible the Xbox 360 dominated within your friend-group or even your locale (fwiw I didn't know anyone who had a 360, my friends who had a console had a PS3) but in terms of raw sales it's edged by PS3 and obliterated by the Wii.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...

The 360 launched first so it was probably at a higher units sold for a few years at least.

Local is the biggest impact, to my understanding Xbox doesn't have much of a market share outside the English speaking world, Playstation does. Xbox 360 was a bit ahead of the PS3 in the US/Australia/UK, but not in Asia and congenital Europe.

Ahhh that makes sense - haven’t been in the Anglosphere during the period in question.

I seem to recall reading that the XBox doesn't sell well in Japan due to it's name: X (battsu) being bad, wrong, or "no". It's why in Japanese PlayStation games circle is confirm and x is cancel.

congenital Europe

Oh my.

> It's why in Japanese PlayStation games circle is confirm and x is cancel.

Not anymore as of PS5.

> congenital

My terrible spelling and macOS autocorrect hates me lol

as a congenitally European person, I chuckled :)

360 had a two things going for its image.

#1 was that the previous generation of Xbox was not the biggest seller, this made the 360 look really good by comparison.

#2 having that 1 year head start, combined with the high price of the Ps3 initially gave it a huge lead. Sony did manage to claw back the user share but it took years to do it.

The Wii captured a fundamentally different market from its competition: that was the whole "blue ocean" strategy Nintendo had in mind, building on success with the DS. The 360 and PS3 sold "convergence" devices instead: they did a little bit of everything home-entertainment related. Enthusiasts with the cash to spare would end up with multiple consoles for the exclusives, but in that generation the software barriers to exclusivity were starting to come down; the PS3 had a more unfamiliar architecture than the 360, but regardless, cross-platform releases running the same engine and assets, vs a completely recoded game with different assets, were now becoming the norm across both consoles, so it was not like the old days of Sega vs Nintendo where you could have a totally different view of gaming by getting one or the other; the high end was actually getting a bit commoditized, and it was just the first-party exclusives that added differentiation.

But the broader market was in unexpected places like senior centers, where Nintendo's offering found an ultra-casual niche. For those markets, it never had to do anything more than play Wii Sports, and was a profitable hardware sale from day 1, where the other two banked on loss-leading for market share and making it up with a high attach rate. Definitely a fad, but also one that printed money.

All three did well enough to keep going, but they're really apples and oranges stories.

This is how I remember it as well.

Nintendo was public about dropping out of the console fight and doing their own thing, which is still true to this day with the switch.

The OG XBox was de rigeur in every dorm room in the country. Mostly for Halo, but football games and racing games and such also made a showing.

The Gamecube's considered a flop because it sold worse than all their other game consoles except the (later) WiiU, which is their other major flop. At the time, it was sitting at the bottom of a not-promising trend line for Nintendo consoles (before the Wii blew that up). It also sold significantly worse than its contemporaries (XBox, PS2... better than the Dreamcast, but that hardly counts). I agree that it's a great system, in fact—the controller is, uniquely, brilliant for introducing young kids to controllers with more than a couple buttons on them, and feels great once you're used to it even for an adult, and it may be lacking in games but it's got a fair number of excellent entries in its library. It's easily my personal favorite of that generation (followed closely by the Dreamcast, actually).

> except the WiiU

Shed a tear for Virtual Boy which, many may not know, was a thing that existed once.

I got to use it in a Wal-Mart or Toys-r-Us or something, once. I distinctly remember that the demo was tucked away on some toy aisle, not even with the other video games & consoles. They must already have realized it was a flop by the time I even saw one in the wild.

I never really regarded that as a proper console, though, since it was very solo-play focused like a handheld, but it's also obviously not a portable gaming device, either. It was its own thing.

OG XBOX was great though for XBMC media center and for pirating games. I guess for playing DVDs, too.

The OG Xbox did sell more units than the Gamecube (~24 million vs. 21.7 million per Wikipedia anyway), but these seem close enough that it's a bit weird to classify them differently. I guess one way to justify that outlook is that Microsoft was coming from nothing in the console space, so getting to a distant 2nd place (even if only narrowly) makes for a decent start whereas the Gamecube sold fewer units than the N64 even while the home console market was growing as a whole.

I would classify them differently. I mean they were both not very successful consoles, but the Xbox was at least a first effort from a new competitor. It makes sense that it was… more of a predictable learning experience.

The GameCube seemed like a surprisingly poor showing from such an experienced company. But hey, hard to give them too much flack given the follow up. Guess the GameCube was a strong unexpected learning experience.

Super Nintendo: 49.1 million sales

Nintendo 64: 32.93 million sales

Nintendo Gamecube: 22 million (PS2: 155 million, Xbox: 24 million)

Nintendo Wii: 101.63 million

Nintendo had very high targets for Gamecube, hoping to make up for some of the "lost ground" of the n64's weaker sales compared to its predecessor. The Xbox struggled heavily in Japan compared to Nintendo, and was a newcomer to the console scene, but still made more total sales.

The Gamecube also had an extra year before Nintendo released a successor compared with the Xbox. Both came out around the same time, but the Xbox 360 was released a full year before the Nintendo Wii. Luckily for Nintendo, the Wii ended up being very popular compared to the Gamecube and sold ~5x more consoles.

I think both original Xbox and Gamecube had sales targets higher than what they ended up reaching, but you could make an argument that Nintendo failed to capitalize on their previous popularity and market share and had a bigger flop.

I agree the sales were close, but I think the narrative/momentum was very different for the two. That was Microsoft's first console. They started with nothing, and by the end of the generation had sold more than Nintendo and established critical IPs and an online service for the next generation. Nintendo, at the time, felt very backed into a corner - which of course gave us the Wii that shattered all expectations.

Part of why they are considered differently is that the Japanese market ignored the Xbox and has continued to more or less. If you look at just the U.S market, the Xbox was very competitive in the first generation. Halo in particular was huge in the U.S., and completely changed gaming and the first-person market forever.

Microsoft loss billions on the original Xbox especially with the ring of death recalls

The RRoD plague affected the Xbox 360, if you mean that.

I'm not here to disagree with you but I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube.

> I'm pretty sure Banjo Kazooie was never on the GameCube.

This is correct, and pertinent to the whole competition story Microsoft already owned Rare through most of that console generation (Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002).

Despite MS owning Rare they still released a couple of Game Boy Advance Banjoo Kazooie games during this time that had already been in development prior to the acquisition, but didn't release a B-K game for Gamecube.

There's an interesting thing in that the sales numbers and the narratives differed strongly in that generation.

The Gamecube, while having sales nearly equal to the original XBox, is beloved mostly in retrospect; at the time of release the consensus between North American enthusiast press and corporate PR swung strongly in favor of "grown up" games(i.e. 90's edginess with swearing, gore, and boob) while Nintendo was still making "kiddie" stuff. Of course, plenty of folks bought Nintendo's offering anyway, but it wasn't clear what their strategy was at that point. They gained their now-standard reluctance to push graphics tech further on consoles with the Gamecube; it was a well-rounded game player, straightforward enough to develop for, and not hugely different from the others in spec, but it avoided doing really flashy graphics demos. And for the press, who had gotten used to talking about how high tech and advanced every release was, and how big the production budgets were, this was an affront. If you make smaller games with less graphics that aren't for the reviewer's specific demographic, their job is harder and needs more nuance.

And so while the larger side of the market aided and abetted a "gamer" image, which was really just catering to whomever would give them more coverage - Nintendo stuck to its own plan. It could afford to; every portable system was a hit. So they started making their consoles more like their portables after the missteps of the N64(which was a graphics beast, but too hard for most developers to delve deep into).

The reality, of course, was that the GCN quickly became a fixture in college dorms because it had good party games like Smash and the Mario Kart series. It was there right along with the PS2 and XBox and their exclusives, and yet when you saw interviews with game industry producers and the like, nobody at the time said "we should be more like Nintendo". They wanted a GTA or a first-person shooter with better lighting effects. And there was a xenophobic "beat Japan" angle among some in favoring Microsoft over Sony or Nintendo. In effect, they gaslit some part of the gaming audience in order to push the type of games they were making and the country that games should come from. It was only later in the 2000's with the next generation releases that critical backlash against the "grey/brown shooter" arose and Nintendo's position was championed - though not by everyone.

While I don't think this was a huge factor, GC had to problem of being the middle child. Ps2 had all the games, Xbox had the highest tech. Add in DVD play back on those two and Gamecube just felt like it was stuck in the middle not doing anything amazing.

Long term the games had had legs far greater than the vast majority of Ps2 and Xbox games but at the time it didn't look like it.

  To suddenly cut Call of Duty (or Activision’s other multi-platform titles) off from Playstation would be massively value destructive; no wonder Microsoft said it was happy to sign a 10-year deal with Sony to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation.

It would be value destructive if all those Sony buyers decided to shrug and not buy a CoD game ever again. It wouldn't be at all if the CoD players could be lured to buy an Xbox. This article asserts that there's effectively no difference between the hardware at this point, so if we accept the article's arguments here, getting the consumers to move from Sony to Xbox with exclusives is theoretically easier than it's ever been. No wonder people are alarmed.

Considering consoles are sold basically at or below cost, getting someone to buy a console instead of just the game almost seems like a value destroyer.

Either way, there surely is a large chunk of people who won’t buy multiple $500 consoles, and those sales WILL be lost of you don’t make the game for their console. I imagine it’s greater than the number of people who will buy another console.

Pardon me for asking, but are you the Vineyard Mike? Owner and Operator of The Vineyard?

It's a bit off-topic and I don't mean to blow-up your spot, but I'm really curious...

Almost certainly not the one you're thinking of.

An important point could be added:

Nintendo and Sega saw their consoles first and foremost as ways to promote their own games, which is where they profited the most. Their business model was centered on their own software. Third party publishers were seen as a necessary evil to be tightly controlled, which is why Nintendo restricted them to just 5 titles a year. The story goes that when Namco first approached Nintendo about publishing on the Famicom, Nintendo was so surprised they didn't even know what kind of terms to offer.

Sony changed all of that by giving publishers a platform where they were welcomed with open arms. Third party publishers no longer had to worry (for the time being) about competing against the platform holder from a disadvantaged position. Furthermore, they didn't have to financially support their rival via licensing royalties.

    It was Nintendo that created the 30% share for the platform owner that all future console owners would implement, and which Apple would set as the standard for the App Store.

Is there a citation for this number? I thought I knew this whole story quite well but this is the first time I've seen someone cite the specific royalty rate Nintendo was getting. I'd always more read the generalization that Nintendo was "expensive", and Sony was "cheaper" and beyond that I got the impression that it was the reduction in costs and increases in flexibility with the shift from Nintendo made carts to cds that dominated royalty differences.

(It's somewhat fuzzy to me around whether anyone was allowed to press Playstation discs or Sony reserved that right alone. I recall hearing the former but don't recall. Similarly I am under the impression that at some point Nintendo had strict control over manufacturing carts, but at some point that was loosened? Perhaps it was that Famicom carts at some point were a grab bag of manufacturers, but it all went in house with the SNES?)

Famicom carts were a free-for-all, as there was no lockout chip in the console. NES carts, and SNES/Super Famicom carts, required a CIC chip to function (or else the lockout chip in the console would prevent it from booting); this allowed Nintendo to control cartridge production.

(Yes, a handful of third parties either illegally copied or figured out a way around the lockout chip for NES; but the vast majority of carts were manufactured by Nintendo themselves.)

It's clear Microsoft aims to "win" the console battle.

That would be a disaster.

When Microsoft "wins", it completely gives up competing and development and rests on it's "top of the market" position - best example of the is Internet Explorer. Once it had wiped out Mozilla, Microsoft stopped development of Internet Explorer entirely.

I don't see why Microsoft has to destroy Playstation.

If anything, the corporate part of Microsoft seems to be going for a strategy of going cross platform everywhere and winning hearts and minds and going where the developers are, opening up, embracing open source.

At the same time, Xbox seems to be veering back into the Microsoft of the 1990's, who's goal was purely to destroy everything that competes with Microsoft.

I hope Xbox fail in their acquisition and they have lost substantial goodwill with me - I'm sure that matters to them.

And I hope Xbox lose in their battle to destroy Playstation.

EEE is coming along quite a bit in VSCode (though, to be fair, they made it). There are quite a few things you can't use if you're not using the official Microsoft-provided builds.

Mostly correct, however it also has a few made up facts.

First of all Nintendo did not create a 30% fee, yes there is a fee, but it certainly wasn't 30%, rather higher.

Second, 3rd party exclusives are as old as game console SDKs exist, regardless of middleware engines.

Third, contrary to FOSS circles, in the game industry most studios are quite found of console exclusives, it gives them exposure in the thousands of games that get released every day, and usually better advance payments schemes to support their development costs, it also creates the market of game studios that are specialized in specific consoles knowing every detail to take the ultimate performance out of them.

All consoles have some exclusive titles from 3rd parties.

One thing not mentioned is that even if Microsoft releases games for Playstation as required by some sort of Justice Department agreement, they don't have to release at the same time, nor with the same features or quality.

Call of Duty 2025 for Xbox available NOW! Coming to Playstation 4 in 2027.

Microsoft in the past was shown to be a cunning and underhanded competitor and that's who Xbox is today - a nasty little backstreet knife fighter willing to hide its sharpest blades until it sticks them in. I am a real believer in the "newer, nicer Microsoft", but I don't think that includes Xbox and I would not trust their words to the Justice Department as being worth a dime.

It's not like Sony plays much nicer. They also delay porting their games to competing platforms, The Last of Us is coming to PC in 2023... 10 years after it's original release.

And Nintendo doesn’t bother at all. When will Mario and Zelda be released on non-Nintendo hardware? Never.

I find it slightly baffling (yet predictable) that Commodore wasn't mentioned once during the transitional leap from the 2600 to "home computers." It's as if the best-selling computer of all time prior to the iPhone has been erased from history.

because this is not an analysis of computing in general. but an analysis about a specific use-case of computers in general: video games; written in response to microsoft's gobbling up of activision

Which is exactly the use case that the Commodore 64 is famous for.

I have played hours and hours of Breakout. I had no idea it was designed by Steve Wozniak.

I entered the article expecting consoles as in terminals and it was as in games :P

Worthy read, though.

You know this article is bullshit when they don't mention xbox exclusives in their illustrations

That's clearly a pro-microsoft PoV doing a subjective analysis of the situation

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim that Ben Thompson had an MS bias.

I’d say he admires their strategy/business model clarity post-Nadella, both in Office/services over Windows and Xbox subscriptions. He also worked there in the past and it comes through he cares more about MSFT than your average worker in tech, but agree I don’t think it rises to level of bias. More like: I almost never think of MSFT (despite using Outlook daily) and Ben does daily.

He also worked for Apple.

But if you compare Microsoft’s model to let’s say Google’s non existent strategy, the difference is night and day. Google has the strategy and focus of a crack addled flea. Nadella came in with a vision and executed perfectly.

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