Was the GBA considered a flop (by Nintendo standards), or a success? [Archive]

diskoboy

06-07-2008, 09:11 PM

guitargary75

06-07-2008, 09:26 PM

I love the GBA. I still play it every other day.

c0ldb33r

06-07-2008, 10:12 PM

The original Gameboy had an 11 year run, compared to the Advances (barely) 4...

The GBA micro didn't really have much success.
I've got no numbers to back me up on this, but I expect that the Gameboy Advance SP was a true success financially. Just think, almost everyone that already bought a GBA probably bought one. Add to that people that owned the original gameboy who now thought, damn, a gameboy with a light? right on.

I agree about the GB Micro. It pisses me off Nintendo never supported that thing. I love mine but I'd like to be able to get some damn accessories / faceplates for the thing :mad:

joshnickerson

06-07-2008, 10:25 PM

I think if it weren't for the DS, we'd just now be seeing the twilight years of the portable, and perhaps even a GBA2 announced.

Had the DS failed, Nintendo would've had the staggering success of the GBA to fall back on. Of course, as we know, the DS went on to sell astoundingly well, and the rest is history.

On a side note, I still know people who refer to the DS as a "Gameboy". :)

Ed Oscuro

06-07-2008, 10:43 PM

Shelf life doesn't mean two you-know-whats to Nintendo if it doesn't affect their bottom line.

In fact, if Nintendo can sell its consoles at a profit, then of course they want you to buy multiple units.

Theory: The only downside to a shorter console lifespan is the cost of designing a replacement.

Of course, the GBA is a fairly old design and the replacement came along just in time.

I think if it weren't for the DS, we'd just now be seeing the twilight years of the portable, and perhaps even a GBA2 announced.
You don't have to take a guess - it's clear from the official press Nintendo was releasing at the time they were slowly revealing the DS to the world that there was some ambiguity as to whether it'd replace the GBA. It seems that it possibly has.

Leo_A

06-07-2008, 11:01 PM

I imagine it has to be considered one of Nintendo's greatest success stories, and helped them financially when the GameCube was underperforming (Even if the GameCube never lost money, the GBA must've been a huge help in producing capital for Nintendo to use to research, develop, and market the Wii and DS).

Over 80 million units sold, and who knows how many millions of games sold. One of the most successful platforms in videogame history, its easy to conclude. And is just now beginning to disappear from store shelfs after a 8 year run.

Pantechnicon

06-07-2008, 11:18 PM

I'd say not a flop. imo other than big N's stubborn refusal to include a backlight I think everything about the GBA was done right in terms of creating a worthy evolution of the Gameboy line. SP improved on it even more. In fact my 2nd-gen SP is now my official "legacy" GB device.

exit

06-07-2008, 11:19 PM

Considering people still ask me for GBA's to this day, I'll have to say that it was a huge success. If Nintendo wanted to, they could easily pump out new GBA games and they'd still sell well, especially considering that the DS is backwards compatible. Of course they just decided to dump the GBA and stopped making games for it, thus is one of the many reasons why we'll never get Mother 3.

retroman

06-07-2008, 11:39 PM

i will say it was a hit, and as it stands now. It is a great starter system for say 3 to 7 year olds. Both of my kids, who are 3 and 5 both have Sps and they love em. Hell i still play mine at least once a week.

Fuyukaze

06-07-2008, 11:48 PM

I'd think by any standerds it would have been considered a complete and total sucsess. Even taking into account that the micro didnt do that well, as a whole the GBA had great support thru it's life and was only killed by a later released system from the same company.

Gentlegamer

06-07-2008, 11:52 PM

I just got a GBA (even though I had a GBA Player for GameCube), and I can't get enough of it!

Metroid Zero Mission RULEZ!

Single Player Gamer

06-08-2008, 01:09 AM

GBA was fantastic but if no one makes games for it....bam dead. I loved the games, my SP was great and I know tons of people who have them still. All good things...

Ze_ro

06-08-2008, 01:22 AM

You don't have to take a guess - it's clear from the official press Nintendo was releasing at the time they were slowly revealing the DS to the world that there was some ambiguity as to whether it'd replace the GBA. It seems that it possibly has.
Indeed. Back before the DS was released, almost every story included the caveat that Nintendo was still working on a "true" followup to the Gameboy line, and that the DS was more of a side-project... this initiated a lot of speculation that Nintendo would just end up competing with themselves when this GBA2 came around.

And I don't see how anyone could consider the GBA a failure. It may have only been around four years, but it had complete control of the market, with no real competition. If it weren't for the PSP, the DS might never have come out and we'd all still be playing GBA.

--Zero

Rob2600

06-08-2008, 01:29 AM

Over 80 million units sold, and who knows how many millions of games sold. One of the most successful platforms in videogame history, its easy to conclude.

Exactly. As of March 31, 2008, the Game Boy Advance series has sold 81.1 million units worldwide. (35.5 million Game Boy Advance units, 43.2 million Game Boy Advance SP units, and 2.4 million Game Boy Micro units)

Also, according to Nintendo.com (http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/gameslist/gamelist.jsp?revealed=true&sh=&gf=&pf=&wifi=false&ww=&mic=&pap=&vc=&man=&rf=&nf=&pp=&sf=Game%20Boy%20Advance&ef=), 976 games were released for it. Is that correct? Wikipedia has a page that lists every Game Boy Advance game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_Boy_Advance_games), but I don't feel like counting them right now.

digitalpress

06-08-2008, 02:38 AM

Interesting topic, but equivalent to "Microsoft... The Next Big Thing in Computing or Some Geek Pimping Warez?"

As a gamer I'd imagine the GBA was a huge success, but I guess I'd still wonder if the rest of the world was buying the bazillion games (most of which I find cool because they somewhat preserve the dying 2D era) for it. As a retailer, I can honestly say that GBA is second only to PS2 in overall sales in my store. Mind you, we're no GameStop. People come to our store looking for obsolete stuff. My GBA section is pretty good and it's constantly being re-stocked because it's constantly being cleared out. That doesn't happen with systems that have failed.

Interested in how this discussion will continue because I know the right answer to this question. Please... carry on.

DefaultGen

06-08-2008, 02:49 AM

.....

diskoboy

06-08-2008, 03:06 AM

Well Nintendo must not have had much faith in the GBA to have the DS in development so early in Advances life...

I realize the GBA had tons of games, and sold many units. But it just didn't have the staying power the original Gameboy hardware had. To me, 3-D still seems like such a small niche, in a handheld market... Now, even cell phones are swinging that direction.

I guess that's what I'm trying to get at....

digitalpress

06-08-2008, 03:16 AM

To me, 3-D still seems like such a small niche, in a handheld market... Now, even cell phones are swinging that direction.

I'll be honest with you - I have no idea what you're talking about. GBA barely breaches the 3D world. It embraces 2D... probably the last grasp at 2D, in fact. So I'm lost on both your 3D reference and your cell phone reference. If cell phones are in fact swinging toward 3D how does that apply to the GBA? And why, if this is a "small niche", do cell phones matter anyway?

Eric Dude

06-08-2008, 03:57 AM

Lord of the Files

06-08-2008, 04:33 AM

Topics at the top of the forum right now:

-was the GBA a failure?

-Doom on Nightmare is hard!

-Is N64 worth getting?

Geez.

digitalpress

06-08-2008, 05:30 AM

Topics at the top of the forum right now:

-was the GBA a failure?

-Doom on Nightmare is hard!

-Is N64 worth getting?

Geez.

You missed "Atari Sux, Rite?" and "videogames are for kids!".

Right down the tubes, it's gone.

Tommy

06-08-2008, 05:56 AM

GBA still rocks my bathroom, probably the only place I play it at and I still buy GBA games.

Electric Blue

06-08-2008, 06:08 AM

A better topic would be "GBA, success or super-success?"

Now, if this topic was about the GC, I think we'd have something to discuss.

Tommy

06-08-2008, 07:13 AM

Not to go off topic but my kids and my neighbor's kids play Mario Kart on the GC everyday for about an hour, I play RE4 and Metroid Prime every now and then.

Frankie_Says_Relax

06-08-2008, 10:10 AM

I was totally un-aware of the GBA being considered to be anything less-than-successful! :eek 2:

GrandAmChandler

06-08-2008, 10:37 AM

Are you kidding me? GBA a flop? Pokemon + GBA kept Nintendo alive during the post millennium game wars. They had a corner on the handheld market, and had one of the biggest multi-demographic properties ever known in videogames. If GBA is such a flop, then why are we still selling new units at retail as well as still keeping stock of many different titles of new games at retail? GBA is definitely not a flop, I would describe it as Nintendo's savior.

-GAC-

c0ldb33r

06-08-2008, 10:38 AM

A good question would have been why was the GB Micro a flop, or hypothetically if the GBA SP wasn't backlit, would it have been a flop.

PentiumMMX

06-08-2008, 11:06 AM

I'd consider it a success for Nintendo. Even though I have every model of Game Boy on the market (Except for Game Boy Light), I use my GBASP for most everything, especially games for the original GB and GBC.

j_factor

06-08-2008, 02:30 PM

A better question is why they stopped releasing games for it so quickly. I feel that there was (maybe even still is) plenty of a continuing market for GBA games.

Jorpho

06-08-2008, 02:43 PM

The original Gameboy had an 11 year run

The original Game Boy was an exception in many ways.

Ed Oscuro

06-08-2008, 03:10 PM

You missed "Atari Sux, Rite?" and "videogames are for kids!".

Right down the tubes, it's gone.
All topics I've spent too much time in :oops:

Zebbe

06-08-2008, 03:30 PM

How can 80 million copies sold be a flop for anyone?

Sudo

06-08-2008, 04:48 PM

There's no way it could be considered a flop.

Gentlegamer

06-08-2008, 04:57 PM

How can 80 million copies sold be a flop for anyone?Hey Zebbe, what are the good Sega games on GBA?

Ed Oscuro

06-08-2008, 05:24 PM

Hey Zebbe, what are the good Sega games on GBA?
3D6 Games? :P

Sweater Fish Deluxe

06-08-2008, 05:52 PM

The original Gameboy had an 11 year run
Saying the Gameboy had an 11 year run is like saying the Atari 2600 had a 13 year run. It's true, but doesn't exactly paint the whole picture. Despite Nintendo's efforts with Color Gameboys and Gameboy Pockets, the B&W Gameboy was pretty much dead in the water from sometime in '94 or '95 until 1998 when Pokemon came out. And then, even though Pokemon was a B&W game, it was the Gameboy Color that everyone played it on and that was really a different system. So, the B&W Gameboy had an active life of five or six years and then lingered on for another three or four until it was replaced by the Gameboy Color.

...word is bondage...

Frankie_Says_Relax

06-08-2008, 07:13 PM

I ask this because the usual shelf life of a console is 5 years. The DS came out, and stole GBA's thunder when the GBA still had a few good years left in it. The original Gameboy had an 11 year run, compared to the Advances (barely) 4.

The GBA micro didn't really have much success.

What do you think?

I think you're misrepresenting the cycle of the GBA.

First of all, and again, the most concise answer to your question is : no.

But additionally I think you're misrepresenting the quote-unquote "life cycle" of the DS ... yes, it was only on the market (with three revisions) for four years before the DS, but I'd say the first two years of sales of DS didn't stop GBA's sales (or public interest) dead in the water ... in fact, I think it's really only been a year or so that hardware/software are trending towards a system that's in it's last throes of it's life (discounting at retail, Gamestop family of stores killing shelf space and transferring all stock to used, etc.).

josekortez

06-08-2008, 07:15 PM

A better question is why they stopped releasing games for it so quickly. I feel that there was (maybe even still is) plenty of a continuing market for GBA games.

Nintendo put all of its marketing muscle behind the DS instead of GBA to convince people that the GBA was antiquated and that they needed to own the DS. And there definitely was a continued market for GBA games even right after the DS was first released. As far as I know, there were more announced titles that probably were switched over to the DS to ensure that they sold, like this random one I just found on O~3 Entertainment's release list:

http://darklight.o3ent.com/

Leo_A

06-08-2008, 07:57 PM

Also worth noting the GBA sold more units than any other Nintendo platform (Unless you throw in GBC numbers with the original GameBoy like a lot of websites do), though it will be overtaken this year by the DS.

LyonsArcade

06-08-2008, 11:21 PM

The only thing I'd like to add is that I wouldn't say the GBA Micro was a flop either. It didn't sell much or anything... but from the very beginning, Nintendo said it was just a limited release thing for a specialty market. They didn't even make them for more than a few months, it wasn't even an attempt to be a hugely successful system. I suppose out of every gameboy ever released, the micro sold the least, but they didn't cut it because it wasn't selling, they cut it because they had said from the beginning it would be a short-term specialty thing.

j_factor

06-09-2008, 12:34 AM

Nintendo put all of its marketing muscle behind the DS instead of GBA to convince people that the GBA was antiquated and that they needed to own the DS. And there definitely was a continued market for GBA games even right after the DS was first released.

Right after the DS? Yes. But it seemed that when the DS came out, the GBA went sharply downhill pretty fast. Once the DS was out, it was very rare for any company to begin developing a new GBA game. I remember looking at the GBA release calendar about a year after the DS launch, and it was pretty barren. When Japan had its last hurrahs in the form of the Bit Generations series, Nintendo of America couldn't even be arsed to bring them over, despite the low amount of translation necessary. Kind of annoying considering Nintendo had sworn up and down at E3 and in press releases that the DS would be alongside the GBA, rather than replacing it.

murdoc rose

06-09-2008, 12:37 AM

things progress faster now besides the ds is just a gba with a touch screen.

Icarus Moonsight

06-09-2008, 01:14 AM

things progress faster now besides the ds is just a gba with a touch screen.

That response is highly inept. Please try again with less fail. :p That's like saying, "The PSP is just a DS with the screens fused together and a tacked-on UMD drive."

The GBA being anything other than a total success is just plumb preposterousness. If it were anything less than we'd have three times the library to collect for our NGPCs. When just the appearance of a new system slaughters it's contemporaries it transcends success. More a Coup de Grace than a win...

Zebbe

06-09-2008, 06:22 AM

Hey Zebbe, what are the good Sega games on GBA?

No idea. I only have a Game Boy Colour. You can count on the former Sega second party company Camelot Software Planning's RPG series Golden Sun to be supreme though. I played it in a video game store back in the day, it bears that unique atmosphere the Shining series had on the Mega Drive.

c0ldb33r

06-09-2008, 07:27 AM

I suppose out of every gameboy ever released, the micro sold the least, but they didn't cut it because it wasn't selling, they cut it because they had said from the beginning it would be a short-term specialty thing.
I agree that maybe Nintendo's expectations weren't all that high for the GB Micro, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a flop even for those reduced standards. How else can you explain the absolute lack of accessories for it (i.e. I've never seen GB Micro link cable/wireless adapter in the wild) and the lack of faceplates (which was what they were hyping most about this system).

I love my GB Micro's, but the system were a flop.

Flack

06-09-2008, 12:22 PM

When I pick my kid up from daycare I still see half a dozen or so kids playing GBAs. I wouldn't call it a failure by any means.

Rob2600

06-09-2008, 01:57 PM

what are the good Sega games on GBA?

Astro Boy: Omega Factor
Baseball Advance
Chu Chu Rocket
Columns Crown
Gunstar Super Heroes
Phantasy Star Collection
The Pinball of the Dead
Puyo Pop
Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon
Shining Soul II
Sonic Advance
Sonic Advance & Sonic Pinball Party Combo Pack
Sonic Advance 2
Sonic Advance 3
Sonic Pinball Party
Virtua Tennis

squirrelnut

06-09-2008, 05:06 PM

I think flack nailed this one. The GBA ruled when it came to the preteen/tween crowd. The GBA micro was just a marketable tech demo. One thing about handheld systems, they never seem dated. When you play a game on a regular console, you can totally be like wow this game is so old. I don't think anyone has ever said that about a game on the GBA.

jb143

06-09-2008, 06:11 PM

When I pick my kid up from daycare I still see half a dozen or so kids playing GBAs. I wouldn't call it a failure by any means.

Funny story that sorta goes along with that.
I took a western themed steam engine to the grand canyon last week. A cowboy dude was walking up and down the isles playing a banjo. There was a kid on the train playing a gameboy advance so the cowboy guy walked up and squatted down beside him to watch him play and switched immediatly from playing the old westy song to the mario theme. The whole thing. He was pretty good at it too. Then he started on the music from level 1-2 but went back to playing and singing his original song. The point being...I'm guessing this was far from the first time it's happened.

Leo_A

06-09-2008, 07:15 PM

Off topic, but what's western themed about Grand Canyon Railway's steam locomotives? They look like typical United States steam locomotives from the first half of the 20th century, such as this one. Have they done something to them since I last saw them?

Or did you just mean the on-board entertainment (You specified the locomotive, not the train).

http://www.thetrain.com//images/fleet_main.jpg

Just curious since I'm a big fan of that operation.

jb143

06-09-2008, 10:30 PM

Well...not to derail the thread more. hehe uhhhh:-/:roll:

Anyways...I think that probally was the train. The engine and most the cars were from the early 1900's but they had actors and musicians on board for entertainment dressed as coyboys and such...staging a train robbery and the like. It was pretty fun.

And by the way...I just said western themed, Arizona and the Grand Canyon are part of the West, you assumed "Old West" :p

c0ldb33r

06-09-2008, 11:23 PM

What in the hell are you guys talking about? This thread is about Gameboy Advance!!! Let's get this sucker back on track:

Poofta!

06-10-2008, 01:30 AM

i thought it was a huge success. it sold more consoles and games than pretty much all of nintendo's consoles after the snes. it had some 1500 games for it... not a failure by any means.

Kitsune Sniper

06-10-2008, 01:54 AM

It wasn't a failure, but Nintendo abandoned it way too soon. And by the end of its lifespan most of the titles were crap shovelware anyway. :(

c0ldb33r

06-10-2008, 08:13 AM

It wasn't a failure, but Nintendo abandoned it way too soon...
I agree wholeheatedly. As an example, take how some games were obviously just ported from GBA to DS sometime through their development. Take Scurge for example: for the GBA or DS - doesn't matter. It's the exact same game, except the DS one has a map displayed all the time instead of having to press the map button.