Technology

Okay, here's my obligatory reminder that it's less of a flop than people, particularly in anglo territories, give it credit for. It sold just shy of the original Xbox and it outsold well liked stuff like the Dreamcast or the Vita about 2 to 1.

A few consoles at that time were very regional. The N64 was a rare sight where I'm from, I have seen an original Xbox in the wild exactly once, it was being used as a DVD player and the owner had no games for it. The Gamecube picked up a lot of steam over here once the price went down to 100 bucks and it got a reputation for having some of the best excluisves of that generation later in its lifespan.

The one thing I'd argue about its longevity as a retro console is that it's almost entirely superseded by the Wii, which can play the entire library natively, has more functional output options and is super easy to find. The Cube is cuter, more iconic and built like a brick, though, so it's a better thing to have on a shelf.

You touched on a few good points, but I think ultimately reached the wrong conclusion.

What 12-year-old boy asking for a Christmas present is going to choose the cutesy purple brick that "only has kid games" over a sleek black PS2 that is seen as being adult, with action and fighting games?

This was literally Segas entire marketing strategy. Nintendo early on decided to lean heavily into the family friendly marketing for their consoles starting with the NES (or famicom, literally family computer) for various reasons but most prominently because of the videogame crash of the 70s.

Sega saw an opportunity to position themselves as an edgier option that would appeal more to the tween and teen demographic and so leaned very heavily into that in their advertising in the 80s and particularly the 90s. This tactic was rather successful and so Nintendo developed a reputation as the console for children. This image was further cemented by certain decisions by Nintendo around game content, most prominently by the rather shortsighted decision to force the Mortal Kombat series of games to recolor characters blood to green instead of the red it was on arcade and sega systems (this could be disabled using a hidden cheat code somewhat rendering the entire exercise moot).

When Sony and Microsoft came along they didn't really need to do anything special besides release whatever games they wanted, the damage to Nintendo's rep was already done. Nintendo then made things even worse for themselves by releasing a console in bright candy colors most closely associated with marketing towards young children that literally looked like a small childs lunchbox.

Then the Wii came along and went HARD on the family-friendly aspect, and just blasted off the shelves.

Nintendo realized that they wouldn't be able to shake the children's console rep they had developed easily and so decided to lean heavily into messaging that their consoles were also for adults. Much of the marketing for the Wii (in fact the majority of it) depicted the console being played by adults and the elderly. It was actually somewhat rare to see advertising for the Wii showing young children using the console, a stark contrast from Nintendo's previous marketing.

This was also reflected in the design aesthetic of the console and its packaging featuring a modern minimalist flat white color scheme with minimal light blue highlights. Compared with previous Nintendo consoles the Wii was downright drab looking. Its packaging looked more like a product from Ikea than a games console.

Nintendo further lucked out with the Wii in that it had a novel control system utterly unlike anything else in the market at the time and so had a massive novelty factor going for it. Additionally helping with this was that they positioned the console at the extreme low end of the market releasing it at a price point well below half the cost of their nearest competitor.

And for the family friendly aspect nothing after the wii beat it.

The multiplayer games there are just better than something like the switch offers, and the controllers are a good size and weight for emulating whatever they are representing in games. Stuff like tennis with the tiny light switch controllers just feels wrong.

The key flaw was it using mini disks. Not only did this kneecap storage capacity for developers, but it also made it difficult to pirate games, which is ironically a big part of its failure.