Stumpokapow said:
... assuming you could the Dreamcast as competition to the PS2, sure.
I mention this, because the way I see it, looking at the PS2 brings us one of three possibilities:
Actually, I think it's easy to resolve all of this if you look at things from a 1998-1999 perspective and then follow time forward. During the 32-bit generation, there were three hardware companies: Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. Without information about the future that no one had access to at the time, you would probably assume at the time that these would once again be the competitors in the following generation, and Sony probably began preparations for their system launch based on this intel.
If you were a Sony exec in 1998 and trying to plot out your next generation system launch based on the leaked info floating around, you'd know that Sega of Japan was rushing out a new system to try to move past the moribund Saturn, and that Nintendo was tentatively planning a new system for a launch in 2000. Given that situation, Sony launching in 2000, after one competitor and near-simultaneously with the other, makes sense from the standpoint of "as market leader, you probably launch a new system more in response to competitive pressure than internal pressure."
Now of course that's not how it actually played out, because Nintendo wound up pushing their launch back a year from their original estimates and Microsoft entered the business almost literally at the last possible second, and of course the Dreamcast had so little backing and sales appeal that the PS2 completely stomped it right away. But Sony certainly marketed the system like the Dreamcast was their "real" competition in the early days and you'd find a lot of historical documents that thought of the generational battle in those terms back in the day.
donny2112 said:
Almost nothing about this generation is normal, though.
I agree completely. :lol We can't base our expectations purely on historical precedent for a host of reasons. I think it's worthwhile to know what precedent
is, though, because when precedent is broken you want to be able to explain why clearly.
If someone said "the Gamecube's successor will have no graphical bump" in 2004, for example, you'd probably call them an idiot, and I'd say you'd be right to. Without additional knowledge (of the motion controller) such a move would be completely nonsensical.
I think you can probably construct a theory for why Nintendo would rush a Wii successor to market, but launching as late as possible is so clearly ingrained both for market leaders and for Nintendo specifically, and the monetary benefits of taking this approach are so huge, that I think someone needs to produce a pretty compelling argument to explain
why Nintendo would walk away from that precedent and that benefit.
donny2112 said:
Due to the quirks of this generation on the HD side (high launch cost taking a very long time to drop and delayed profitability from the business) necessitating a pushing out of their lifespans, Nintendo could launch 6 years after the release of the Wii (i.e. longer than usual since the SNES) and still be first to the market. :lol
Okay, that's a good point. My big objection to most of the "omg wii 2 any day now" arguments is that people are literally suggesting that Nintendo is going to cut the Wii down after four years on the market, which strikes me as completely ludicrous.
However, if we go through another two years on the market, another round of pricecuts, exhaust a little more of the well of first-party software potential, the Wii will start to be in a position more like where the DS is now where a replacement starts to look both viable and sensible on its own merits regardless of how the competition is moving.
