- GameJunkieJim
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- Exalted Mythic Member
Simple -- And remember - it's only my opinion, so don't flame or anything.
Nintendo has dominated the market early on, and continues to do so. Nintendo's current system currently has over 3,000 games availiable for it - Counting GB, GBC, SGB, and GBA titles. The number one player for these systems for the last 10 years has been the adult that want's a simple game fix.
For example - The GameGear was a handheld Color portable, that had a better resolution than the GameBoy, It was far faster, and didn't produce a blur, better games etc, It should have whooped the GameBoy, The NEC TurboExpress should have killed it too!
But they didn't for a couple of reasons.
#1 Value - by the time these systems were out - The GameBoy was cheaper and had more availiable.
#2 Post Purchase Cost - The GameGear went through batteries 3 times as fast as the GameBoy and used 2 more batteries, the Turbo Express used 4 Batteries like the Game Boy, but burned them up in about an hour and a half.
#3 Availability - At that time Nintendo was established as a name and simply crowded Sega and NEC out.
The GameBoy's initial success and continued success meant that they could recover from a big marketing mistake in '95 when they released the Virtual Boy. The Game Boy Color added value to Nintendos market because it could play all the old GameBoy games.
So people were happy that they didn't have to throw out their old system and games for the new one, and all was well in NintendoLand - Competition once again tried to interfere with Dictator Mario's HandHeld Monopoly. Neo-Geo. The Neo-Geo Pocket was a Black and white system with 16-bit graphics - clearer and smoother than anything the GameBoy or GameBoy Color could put out. It didn't initially sell well because people who had been asking for a color Nintendo portable since the days of GameGear and Lynx, finally had one, and the new system didn't even have color! SNK fixed the problem but soon went under. And the NeoGeo Pocket color™ simply couldn't get any marketing, not that it would have mattered much.
The GameBoy Advance Debuts, and The Nokia N-Gage debuts. The N-Gage is vastly superior in terms of processing power and graphic handling, yet they are failing too. Nintendo's success with the other two systems has caused more and more to buy their new system, while shunning the N-Gage - Only in Europe, where the Nintendo Marketing Muscle hadn't penetrated right, does the N-Gage have a healthy following.( On a side note - the Sega Master System also did better in Europe than the NES, because of Europes anti Monopoly laws - the Sega had more of a chance there)
Sadly - The PSP looks to go the same way. It's going to be amazing hardware, but new hardware brings with it risks, and do you want to risk your $300 up front with a company that has yet to prove how it will do in the handheld market? Some of us may say yes - but the majority will say "not yet". The period of doubt it what will make or break a system. And I feel that MicroSoft would have an even harder time trying to pull something like this off...
MicroSoft had a hard enough time getting into the Console game -- and even now are only a weak second place...
I hope this was a good enough explanation.
-JIM