Nintendo sucks

[Private Hudson]

Originally posted by A Black Falcon
XBL shouldn't be used as a standard for Nintendo Online... for the reason that Nintendo wouldn't limit it to just broadband. That would help a lot...

And Dreamcasts was 56k. Which was free, and came included with the system. But point taken.

And how do you know that XBL hasn't made an impact or helped sales or anything? That sounds completely wrong...

Hasn't helped hardware sales. The people who bought it originally already owned an XBox presumably. And since the first month, it's sales have slowed down quite a lot. Although, it's hard to tell. For all we know, EVERYONE who bought XBL! were just waiting for the XBox to go online before buying one.

Zelda was expected to help the Cube a lot. It did.

Well, we'll wait for sales figures to see Zelda's impact on the market. I'm guessing you'll see the GCN come close to the XBox (though not overtake it), then for sales to go back to normal. At least in America.

A online network would do at least that because of what I said -- people avoiding the Cube, or who like Nintendo but not Nintendo's policies, would get one! I don't understand how it could possibly not have a huge impact... MORE PEOPLE WHO DONT HAVE CUBES WOULD BUY ONE FOR ONLINE GAMES THAN NON-ONLINE ONES!

Well again, considering the impact that online to every other console has had (read: A lot less than "huge"), why would the GCN be an exception? Why would Mr. and Mrs. Casual all of a sudden forget about their XBox and PS2, which they may or may not already have online, and buy a GCN? For Mario Kart and FZero?

The majority of people that would end up taking the GCN online would be those who already own it. Just like those who have taken their PS2's online. Just like those who have taken their XBox's online.

How can you possibly dispute that? Do you honesly think Mario Kart Offline and F-Zero Offline will sell as well as possible online versions would? Huh?

Their impact on the GCN's hardware sales would be minimal. The games will already be selling on their offline mode alone, which again, I would hazard a guess at most people who want to take the games online would also want to play it offline, so it's sales might be somewhat higher - but not in the area of SOCOM: US Navy seals, which was made for online play (not offline) and was hyped as Sony's flagship online title.

F-Zero just needs marketting behind it, online or offline. It deserves to sell much better than it did on the N64.

And look harder at those all-console games with XBL. You will notice the X-Box one is disproportionately high in almost every case...

Like what? :)

Back to my original point - Online capabilities is not a necessity for Nintendo (or anyone, really) this generation.