>>12086609
>There's over 20 million Gamecubes in the world. Nintendo made a profit on every single one of them. That's not a "failure".
By that logic no console has "failed", Saturn, success, Wii U, success, 32X, success becau they "made a profit on every single one". GameCube started at $199, about $100 less than PS2 and XBox and even then the price drops were early and severe, within a year they were selling these things for $149 and one year after, $99 each, a price point where it would remain for the next 3 years. In the last couple years not only were they selling the console for $99 but they included a game, controller and wrap in the bundle. They were definitely losing money on hardware manufacturing costs alone and that is before you take into account R&D and advertising costs.
Of course the next argument is software but those Nintendo masterpieces don't come cheap to make and advertise. Also unlike today the "always $60" rule wasn't in effect, Nintendo games had lots of sales and price drops, older 1st party games went for as little as $20 and that is just the retailer price, not Nintendo's cut of the profit. As for game sales in volume, it was a far cry from even the N64 days let alone the SNES, no Nintendo GameCube game moved even 10 million copies, only 3 games sold above 5 million.
Nintendo themselves forecasted to investors to sell 50 million GameCubes and certainly not at such desperately low prices, this was a disaster for Nintendo and the only things that really pulled their ass out of the fire was the GBA's success and the Wii and NDS that followed it.