Never buy a system at launch. Why? Let's look back at some North American launch lineups (highlighting exclusives and well received titles), reverse chronologically:
(This is just my personal opinion and recollection; keep that in mind if I miss or dismiss anything in particular.)
WiiU: Basically a a barren wasteland. 29 in total at launch (which sounds like a great number, but...) and nine exclusives; you've got two games from Nintendo (the pretty fun Nintendoland and the not so fun NSMB U) , ZombiU from Ubisoft, and the rest are ports (some of which are of games that have been out for years) or poorly received. Thanks to the lack of support so far, they get a gold star on the "Nintendo is bad at launching shit" scoreboard.
Wii: Again, poor Nintendo. 21 games at launch. We've got Wii Sports, Red Steel (not a hallmark of quality but an exclusive anyway), Excite Truck, Wario Ware Smooth Moves, Super Monkey Ball, and that's about all. TP was there at launch but as it came out on the Gamecube at the same time (negating any reason to buy a Wii if you just wanted the next Zelda), I'm going to ignore it. There were a few more exclusives like Downhill Jam, but the quality of the remainder really starts to get iffy and none sold in massive numbers, to my knowledge at least.
PS3: What a disaster. 14 titles at launch, four exclusive. Of those, only two received anything approaching good reviews: Ridge Racer 7 and Resistance. It'd take a year before the PS3 turned over anything approaching "must have" status, and even longer to hit its stride. Honestly, with that lineup plus the price tag, I can't believe it sold even in the middling numbers that it did at the start. They out Nintendo'd Nintendo.
360: With no competition at launch, you can forgive it's meager offerings, even if that's the cold comfort of hindsight. 18 titles, five exclusives. There was PGR3 and Ridge Racer 6 for the driving sector, Amped 3 for the sports sector, Kameo for the "I like weird elf ladies" sector, and Perfect Dark Zero for the "Let's destroy a franchise!" sector. You wouldn't get Halo for two years, and it's amusing to think that CoD 2 sold just two million copies and was considered a huge success, whereas if a CoD game did that today, someone would be beheaded for their failure.
Xbox: It had Halo. If you liked Halo, the rest was pretty irrelevant. If you didn't, it had seven other exclusives out of 12 games total, but let's be honest; Halo made the launch. Without that, it'd be a lower than average game total with a better than average number of exclusives for a middling result.
Gamecube: Nintendo! *sad trombone* Same number of games as the Xbox (12), but only four exclusives and none of them were Halo, figuratively (and literally) speaking. I mean, I love Luigi's Mansion more than most, but launching a Nintendo console without a Mario game was unheard of back then, and for good reason; everybody lost their mind when they got their hands on Super Mario 64, and we had none of that here. Other notables include Rouge Leader (which I loved), and Super Monkey Ball (which was worth a bit of amusement). Better than the PS3 launch by virtue of Pikmin and Melee shoring up the poor showing within a few weeks, but it was a dire opening that helped forecast its doom against the might of the PS2.
PS2: It had a pile of titles (close to 30, with double digit exclusives), and while only a few were well received, you were at least drowning in games instead of dying of thirst like the poor Gamecube and PS3. The PS2 was a system where the launch really didn't matter; the floodgates were open from the beginning and the deluge never stopped.
Handheld bonus round!
Vita: Hahaha oh man. I'm not going to even go into it, the pain is still too real.
3DS: I mean, holy shit. How many games in the launch lineup weren't a total disaster? Three? Four? Maybe five? I mean, when Nintendo comes out a few months later and says "We've done fucked up!" and offers a pile of free shit to you for just buying into the system, you know it's all gone wrong. Getting a bit better now, though, but...wow.
PSP: Wipeout? Pretty sweet. Lumines? Pretty sweet. Metal Gear Acid? Pretty weird. I honestly didn't spend that much time with the PSP as I was a DS kind of guy all the way through, but it at least had a few good games at the start which caught my eye. Still, it was a lot of cash and the promised grandeur of the thing never really materialized.
DS: For a system that would ultimately blow even the PS2 out of the water, it had a fucking disaster of a start. I spent more time in Pictochat than in any one game, and when a remake of Super Mario 64 is what you waste the rest of your time on, things are beyond dire. I remember I must have played the demo of Metroid Prime: Hunters for at least 20 hours, just due to a lack of...anything. Thank god you could plug your GBA games into it, or I wasn't going to make it to the point where it delivered on its promise.
Things get fuzzier the farther I go back, but you get the general idea. System launches boil down to the idea that you are paying it forward; good sales at launch means more publisher interest, which means more games. It's a bad situation; if enough people don't buy in early, you aren't going to get the publisher support later on, but what the hell do you do with the system in the mean time? Are you willing to bank your cash on the promise of games in the future?
I'm not. I bank on the promise that other people will bank on that promise, and as such they'll take the hit for me, and I can swing in a year later and reap the rewards. If people ever wise up, that won't fly. Still, I'm always optimistic. Maybe this system will have a good handful of games at or close to launch that I cannot get anywhere else, and really desire to play?
Then again....over the past 13 years, it hasn't happened yet!
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