Quote Originally Posted by Rob2600 View Post
I find it interesting that Nintendo was able to create a game console that produced graphics nearly as good as the Xbox, but for almost half the cost. I remember reading that the Xbox cost Microsoft around $400 to produce at launch, while the GameCube cost Nintendo a little under $200 to produce at launch.

Yes, the Xbox contained a 10 GB hard drive. How much was Microsoft paying for that in bulk, in 2001? Let's say...I don't know...maybe $60 each. I'm just guessing. So $400 minus $60 equals $340 to manufacture the Xbox (sans hard drive) vs. let's say $195 to manufacture the GameCube - and both machines produce similar graphics.

I just wonder why one company needed to spend roughly $340 per console (again, sans hard drive), while another company spent roughly $195 per console, which was nearly as powerful.
I'm starting to see a trend in your posts. You appear to be a Nintendo fan boy who is intent on bashing the Xbox at any chance. The Gamecube has some great games and I think it was a great console. Having said that, it's not even close to the Xbox in graphics capability and it can't push the kind of detail or number of elements on screen that the Xbox can. It's not just the graphics on games like Halo that the Gamecube couldn't handle, it's also the multi-player both over a LAN and on-line that it didn't have leftover horsepower to handle. Tracking multiple human controlled players in real time is super processor intensive and that's why you never saw anything beyond four player games on the Cube.

Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube is great. Of course, like all Resident Evil games, your character moves relatively slowly and there aren't hundreds of enemies on screen at once. It's the perfect game for a capable but not necessarily technically spectacular console, which is why the Wii version holds up so well.

The Xbox hard drive allowed for game saves without investing in overpriced, low capacity memory cards. As you probably know, if you actually wanted to save anything on your GC, it cost a minimum of another $20 for a third party memory card and $30 for a Nintendo model at launch. The Xbox has a built-in networking adapater which allowed playing games with lots of people on-line at once whereas if you wanted to play one of the handful of on-line capable Gamecube games, you had to invest in an expensive and not widely available plug in adapter. In addition, the significantly faster processor (allowing for the kinds of multiplayer games that previously only PCs could handle) and higher end graphics card are what pushed the cost of the Xbox to $400 as opposed to $200.