/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7246443
>what lesson were they supposed to learn, exactly?

At least try to match the competition in capability and features. The N64 fucked up primarily with not going with CD-ROMS and instead sticking with expensive and comparably very limited space cartridges. They almost managed to do the right thing with Gamecube but just before crossing the finishing line and winning the race they decided to do a 180 and "pull a Nintendo" and crammed a propitiatory mini-disk player in there because gimmicks-before-function had become Nintendo's fundamental design philosophy at that point.

This naturally meant that DVD-playback, that both Playstation 2 and the Xbox had, was out of the question and gave the competition a gargantuan feature advantage seeing as standard DVD players cost as much as a console at the time at it would be cheaper to just buy a PS2 and use that for movies AND games (like A LOT of people ended up doing) than having to buy a Gamecube and then a dedicated DVD-player costing twice as much.

Aside from lack of DVD-playback, the other issue with the small disk was that they had relatively limited space (that worked so great with the N64 amirite Nintendo) and that in turn dictated and limited developers in how they could store and access game-data and potentially would require games and engines to be built around shortcoming, making the system less attractive for developers and less lucrative for publishers wanting to do cross-platform releases, again ending up netting Nintendo less games on their system other than the ones they paid to be developed as system exclusives or where first party.

Had the Gamecube used standard DVD discs and offered DVD-playback it might have won the generation, but as it's become abundantly clear over the years, Nintendo never learns and never listens.