Thread 11964424

Why did Rockstar so stubbornly refuse to release GTA on the GameCube?

It's not like it wouldn't have sold. GameCube had a very similar number of users to the Xbox (22mil GameCube sales vs 24mil Xbox sales, according to the last reports).

It's especially weird since Rockstar released GTA titles on the GBC and GBA.

>>11964424 (OP)
They had enough money and knew how to be grateful. That's how you grow a company.

Greed is not always profitable.

>>11964424 (OP)
>It's not like it wouldn't have sold. GameCube had a very similar number of users to the Xbox

GameCube users were little children not adults or teens like the Xbox

>>11964439
>he thinks children didn't want to play GTA
LMAO

That's a myth, anyway. GameCube was pretty big with teens and college-aged guys at the time thanks to Smash Bros

>>11964449
10-11 years old childrens want to play GTA

Not 6-7 years old like the userbase of the GameCube

>>11964424 (OP)
i dont think youre fitting VC on one of those minidisks
im sure theres other issues as to why it wouldve been a huuge pain to port, but if you cant fit the whole world on one disk, thats a pretty big problem

>>11964424 (OP)
Target demographics are important. Kids who already owned an xbox were likely to get a game like GTA than kids who owned a gamecube.

>>11964424 (OP)
>"WHY YOU REFUSED"
Dude, PS2 was selling 4x more units than GC in America, even Xbox sold better. The question is, why would they bother?
>GC is roughly 15% of the market
>huge hassle to port GTA to a smaller disc and a different architecture (not so hard with Xbox when you have PC version already)
>obviously Nintendo wouldn't like it
>GC auditory was clearly not the best kind for GTA

Because 3rd party games often do worse on Nintendo consoles compared to other consoles.

>>11964424 (OP)
Gamecube struggled with open world games so it got very few of them.

>>11964461
>Not 6-7 years old like the userbase of the GameCube
Imagine thinking internet forum insults from 2003 reflect reality in any way.

>>11964510
Mature rated gamecube games sold poorly.

>>11964490
>i dont think youre fitting VC on one of those minidisks
3 and VC would both fit on a single GameCube disc. SA is the only one that couldn't be ported without splitting it up.

>>11964502
>even Xbox sold better
2 million units better, which is not significant enough to be notable.

Also, GameCube was actually competing decently well for the first year or two after launch, it was the late gen (2004, 2005, 2006) where it performed more poorly.

>>11964516
>3 and VC would both fit on a single GameCube disc
They wouldn't run on the cube, which is the problem.

>>11964520
How retarded are you? GCN was significantly more powerful than the PS2.

>>11964531
It couldn't run it, the few open world games it got were noticeably downgraded or performed like shit. GC was not as powerful as PS2, couldn't handle it.

>>11964534
>GTA3 was recently ported to the fucking dreamcast of all consoles by fans
>but anon thinks the gamecube couldn't handle it
This is your brain on terminal Sonyfaggotry.

>>11964432
Basically what he said >>11964439
it wasn’t necessarily true, but that was the perception back then. We didn’t have internet back then to actually gauge demand from certain demographics. And before you say companies always had consumer data, if that was true, why nowadays is everything literally driven by social media? And companies lots of time got screwed because they believed them. For example Shenmu 3 was one of the most demanded games ever in the internet, and when it came out, it sold less than 200k for fucks sake. Even flops that were utter garbage sold better, meaning there was no initial demand in the first place.
FF7 Remake is now a burden on Squeenix, first part only reached 7 million after 3 years, meanwhile Elden Ring sold 12 million in two weeks. The trilogy wasn’t a factor for casual audience, and it received good reception, and looked cutting edge graphically.
Basically companies always followed word of mouth, if there was no internet, Switch will also be called a kiddy game console and no adult games will release on it.

>>11964516
This anon >>11964503 is right though. Nintendo consoles always have this problem where top 1st party games sell gazillions, while most other games sell like shit. It just confirms that people buy Nintendo consoles mostly for Nintendo games, and if you wanted 3rd party games you'd buy Playstation. And no, it wasn't a "strong" competitor, it was selling about as well as DC.
This and the rest of my points still stand. All this hassle just to port GTA to a console that has 15% of the market, and sell even less than that.
Finally, to add, Renderware was made for PS2. Reminder that the PC version axed all the effects and looked like shit. Porting it to GC would require effort, specialized staff and all that, at which point it was just not worth the hassle.

>>11964542
Somehow, the gamecube has no GTA. At least it has minecraft. I guess. You'd think with the army of autists Nintendo has cultivated someone could port GTA3 like the two people on dreamcast are doing. Really shouldn't be this hard.

Unless the cube can't run it. Cube can't do open world games.

>>11964542
>GTA3 was recently ported to the fucking dreamcast of all consoles by fans
and it runs like shit, thanks for proving his point

>>11964551
>Nintendo consoles always have this problem where top 1st party games sell gazillions, while most other games sell like shit.
That has more to do with Nintendo being the only console-manufacturer that ever had a wide range of valuable IP.

Sony have never had a Mario, a Zelda, a Pokemon, not even a Smash Bros. Their 1st party efforts have only ever gone for a few entries before being unceremoniously dropped for the next thing. They don't bother to cultivate their IPs into franchises that could sell millions upon millions.

Even in the GameCube gen, when 3rd parties put effort into a GameCube version it would definitely sell well. Soul Calibur 2 sold more on GameCube than PS2, for instance.

Also I find it funny people still parrot this "people only buy 1st party games on Nintendo consoles" meme. If that was the case, you wouldn't have seen every 3rd party rushing to port whatever games they possibly could to the Switch (even shit that had no business running on it, like Witcher 3).

>>11964582
>Soul Calibur 2 sold more on GameCube than PS2
This was due to the promotional tie with nintendo. Being the last appearance of oot link gave it a significant appeal to diehard n64 fans who felt jilted. Unfortunately for them, it was a fighting game.

>>11964424 (OP)
there's no way the Gamecube could handle LODs, texture rendering, draw distance and the entire audio of the game in a miniDVD
why the fuck would they bother to port the entire game into a vastly different architecture that would produce poor results compared to PS2, PC, Xbox?
>inb4 muh Dreamcast port
I don't care what retards say, this is literally unplayable
20 fps and literal freezing are unacceptable

>>11964591
GC actually has no hardware support for backface culling, so you have to render the entire scene. This would be a nightmare on GTA especially.

>>11964582
And? How does this disprove anything I've said?
>meme
Nigger, do at least a little bit of research
Switch gets the ports because
1) It's one of the best selling consoles of all time, so even getting a fraction of users is still profitable
2) We live in an era where console exclusivity is almost dead, Sony games are on PC and devs will port games anywhere if it means more sales
3) Porting is easier than ever

>>11964592
>no blackface on GC
That's why it couldn't run San Andreas

>>11964546
maybe because shenmue 3 and ff7r are bad

>>11964560
>You'd think with the army of autists Nintendo has cultivated someone could port GTA3 like the two people on dreamcast are doing
Sega fans do ports, Nintendo fans do mods.

>>11965103
StarCraft if he gay

>>11965124
>blizzard game
It's already flaming. Pikmin is the straight option.

>>11965103
I don't find these shrek and cj model swaps very interesting.

>>11965147
The mods I'm referring to have way more effort put into them than model swaps.

I can't imagine Vice City on GameCube... like... on 1.4gb? you must rip a LOT of radio content... and with that bullshit fischer price controller?

>>11964520
They run on the Dreamcast

>>11964513
There were M rated GC games? I never even noticed

>>11965226
and doom runs on pregnancy tests, your point?

>>11964424 (OP)
>stubbornly refuse

I don't know if there's any evidence of that. Every article I can see said they planned it and then canned it for reasons no one has really elaborated on - however between Xbox, PS2 and PC the games sold huge margins, and it becomes a simple business calculation as to whether the money to port it will pay off in money back.

The GC, whatever revisionists want to say, was a failure of a system by the mid 00s, and was being talked about in those terms by the industry.

In my experience, the only people who played it were people whose parents wouldn't buy them a PS2, or who had a slavish devotion to Nintendo. It had some great games on it, sure, but I only knew one person who had one by 2005, virtually all my other friends had a PS2.

I think it's just simply that they didn't think the investment would be worth it.

>>11964531
>GCN was significantly more powerful than the PS2
people still parrot this to this day despite devs saying the exact opposite

>>11965171
Vice City does actually come in at about 1.4GB, at least my Steam files. Not sure if that's using compression algorithms unviable on GC though.

>>11964461
You are full of shit. I got a gamecube when I was 8 and wanted to play GTA because my friends at school were talking about it.

>>11964424 (OP)
because the shitcube sucks, the controller would be gay to use and they’d have to gut the fuck out of the games cutscenes and soundtrack. cubies are mentally ill

>>11964424 (OP)
Maybe you forgot that the gaycube used one of the worst pieces of optical media ever made. Good fucking luck packing all of GTA on these.

>>11964449
children wanted to play GTA yes
but their parents werent gonna buy gta for their kids if they bought them a gamecube, they were getting teen rated games at most

otherwise, it wasnt gonna happen simply because the gamecube disc isnt big enough to hold all the radio stations

>another crying toddler thread because they had no fucking games to play
Lol

>>11966153
GTA 3 would definitely fit on a single GC disc, Vice City might need some cuts and San Andreas isn't going to happen. If Nintendo had allowed dual layer miniDVDs to be used Vice City would have easily fit with no cuts on one disc.

>>11964424 (OP)
Intendo wouldn't let 'em because it was too rough and nasty.

>>11964424 (OP)
Compressing the game to fit on a 1.5GB minidisc would have been challenging.
Nintendo was still apprehensive about letting controversial games release on their console.
The Gamecube's demographic was nerdy faggots and children so it wouldn't have sold as well as it did on PS2 and Xbox.

>>11967197
>If Nintendo had allowed
It couldn't do dual layer discs due to the way the laser functions.

>>11964424 (OP)
R* fundamentally were still a Euro dev at the time, and they knew precisely 3 people in the Eurozone had a GCN. It wasn't worth it. it may have sold about as well as the Xbox, but where those sales were located is an important factor. GCN sales were localised almost entirely in Japan, whereas the Xbox sold decently well in all markets.

>>11964516
>3 and VC would both fit on a single GameCube disc
It's tricky, since they would need to compress the audio, and also figure out how to accommodate duplication of game archives with models and textures without losing performance on a Gamecube, since It uses the lot of space too, but still fits the DVD-Disc.

>>11967197
There's more issues than just storage, the format was just terrible in every way.

>>11964424 (OP)
18+ game
babby console

>>11964424 (OP)
couldn't fit on the chocolate chip cookie

>>11966197
>but their parents werent gonna buy gta for their kids if they bought them a gamecube, they were getting teen rated games at most
LMAO what a myth.

I was a GameCube kid and my parents didn't give a single shit about me having 18+ games. I had a PS2 as well and my mom bought me GTA San Andreas for it.

Where do you get this idea that the only kids who had Nintendo consoles were from fundie families or some shit? We just liked Nintendo games, that's it.

>>11964560
Western devs prioritized PS2 (and sometimes Xbox), which affected multiplatform releases because of different architecture, same shit happened with games made with the GameCube as a base. PS2 to Cube conversions had to take concessions for certain special effects tailormade for the hardware or disc size (while some games on PS2 omitted features like MoH Frontline multiplayer). Then there are devs that outsourced low quality ports because they didn't care about the cube. The PS2 was overall weak compared to the rest and it's video quality was poor, but it had some powerful features that allowed to circumvent those limitations, assuming you can take advantage of that.

>>11968951
In any case, PS2 GTAIII is full of dummy files and I remember the game being overall below the minidvd max size. Vice City was over 2GB so it would require some work.

>>11964449
>at the time
No, that's definitely more of a retroactive thing. Competitive Melee didn't start to really pop until the late 2000s.

>>11969683
They both have six copies of the same gta3.img on PS2 to improve streaming. And total size of Vice City (for an example) Is 4.35gb

>>11969697
The big problem is also the GC laser is really slow. PS2 is about 4.5-5.5MB/s on the low end. GC peaks around 3.5MB/s. There's less useful RAM too but the Dreamcast guys are showing they can figure that out pretty well.

>>11969690
True, Without tourneyfags from the late 2000s the smash melee scene wouldn't exist today. People seem to forget this was happening during the *wii* years, not Gamecube. Probably too young to know this.

>>11969697
Vice City still duplicates some stuff, only now it's inside some folders.