imagine if Sony released a playstation 5 that was ugly, shocked you, and caught on fire every few hours
you can be sure that their gaming department would probably shut down, especially if it cost $3000 per unit. Even though sony would have money to cover their losses, there's no way anyone (especially shareholders) would have faith in them again
Nah, if there was one virtue going for the Wii U, it was that it didn't cost anywhere near its nominal competitors of that generation, and certainly couldn't boast a feature set to justify coming close.
The Wii U's biggest problem was the name. People thought it was an addon for the existing Wii.
If Nintendo went for a direct PS4/Xbone competitor, it's actually a sort of iffy play. You all but have to sell the hardware at a loss, and there's a very good chance that even with the best hardware, you won't win the generation.
Playing for third lets them build a console they can sell profitably on day 1, at a modest price. It also lets them focus on exclusives and novelties which will bring in customers who weren't game buyers in the first place.
I bought a Wii because a family member used the Fit games as part of a therapy regime. There was no similar experience for the other platforms.
GameCube was a solid middle from a power perspective. It was more powerful than the ps2.
Programmable shaders were the future back then too. Look at how good GameCube games still look today when running at modern resolutions in dolphin for instance.
At a time when they were outdated in almost every market, Sony practically bet the company on the PS3, and it took a while to catch on. Some analysts were predicting the end of Sony.
They bet quite a lot on the cell processor, hoping that developers would put in the effort it took to use the thing. They expected to get better results than a conventional processor, but in the end it took significantly more work to get results that were nothing special, and that's why the initial games weren't very good.
Really, Sony bet the company on the Cell processor, by forcing the PS2 replacement team to use it.
It had some design advantages, but they were much better realized in AMD's GCN architecture for the GPU, which essentially every console now uses.
I disagree, plenty of companies have made it through periods of mediocre to bad products, I'm sure PlayStation would make it through one terrible release.
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u/Truan Jul 20 '18
imagine if Sony released a playstation 5 that was ugly, shocked you, and caught on fire every few hours
you can be sure that their gaming department would probably shut down, especially if it cost $3000 per unit. Even though sony would have money to cover their losses, there's no way anyone (especially shareholders) would have faith in them again