Nintendo Announces Gamecube Launch Numbers

cbirdsong64 writes: "Planet Gamecube has a story about the Gamecube launch quantities for the U.S. and Japan. Apparently, the Japanese launch will consist of 500,000 Gamecubes, all purple. Nearly 900,000 Gamecubes will be shipped this year in Japan. The North American launch will have 1.1 million (!!) units availiable, with no colors announced. The Big N plans to ship a total of four million Gamecubes worldwide by March 2002. They're doing a whole lot better than Sony did last Christmas." Maybe when the much-anticipated Gamecube ships, I can pick up a discounted PS2 and GT3 :)

Comments

Slightly premature...

[AndrewHowe]

"They're doing a whole lot better than Sony did last Christmas."
Er, well, they haven't sold any yet!
I seem to remember Sony saying they were going to have loads available too.
Wouldn't it be wise to wait until Christmas before making a comment like that?

Re:Getting one of these...

[Moonshadow]

Trollish as you may be, I'll respond.

You're missing the point. The numbers mean jack. It's the performance that counts. What you're failing to realize is that 333MHz on dedicated hardware running games that are designed to specifically run on that hardware will perform VERY nicely. PC processors have to be faster because they have more overhead involved in producing the same output. Why do you think you have to have a system that's ludicrously more powerful than a console in order to emulate that console? Because the PC isn't designed to run those games. It's designed to run lots of software meeting varying specs. Software that's written for an explicit set of hardware is very efficient, as opposed to software that has to run on umpteem billion hardware configurations.

If they can get the desired performance out of a 333, I'm all for it. Saves me $200 at Best Buy.

Think first, post later.

best console out there

[egomaniac]

What's interesting is that as much as the popular press likes to talk about the X-Box being more powerful, most observers at E3 pegged GameCube as having better graphics (not to mention games, where there's no comparison).

It's $100 cheaper, has much better games, it's a lot smaller, has a better controller -- what more do you want?

Gamecube all the way...

--- egomaniac

Re:best console out there

[cmstremi]

"...what more do you want?"

Cupholder.

Market Saturation?

[Rackemup]

Is there realy enough of a market to support all these different gaming consoles? Sony, M$, Nintendo... all shipping millions of units. I'm predicting that it'll turn into one big marketing push to get as much crap on the market as fast as possible to beat the competition and to hell with the quality of the actual games.

The last console I bought was a SNES, and since my computer can do everything the new consoles can do and a whole freakin lot more I doubt that I'll ever buy another. But as long as people have money to burn I guess it'll never stop.

There can be only 2

[blindauer]

Every console hardware generation has exactly 2 successful consoles.

8 bit: NES, SMS
16-bit: Genesis, SNES (TG-16 failed)
32-bit: PlayStation, Nintendo 64 (Saturn failed)
64-bit: PlayStation 2, ??? (DreamCast failed)

So there's really only room for one more: XBox or GameCube. Given:

• Nintendo has launched *five* successful game consoles. Microsoft has lanuched none.
• Nintendo has (arguably) some of the best game developers on the planet. Microsoft has Bungie.
• The gaming hardcore seems to like XBox. The kids will all want GameCube. The kids outnumber the hardcore gamers by a wide margin.

I think that Nintendo is going to eat Microsoft's lunch.

--Bradley