<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>If you actually go to their site and look at the numbers they claim, you began to wonder like why didn't Nintendo have 100% of the market if they sold a bizillion copies of everything out there. According to them N64 has a majority in Japan or something too (okay, maybe not, but close).
Of course, it probably works out that their development costs offsets the bulk of the bizillion whatevers they're selling that's not Pokemon (which can't possibly cost them that much money to make). So I don't see very much point in boasting that you can spend a million to sell something that makes a million back.
Console hardware is pure loss, and Nintendo's definitely taking a bigger loss on their systems to push it to the $200 price tag. I don't think they can take enough of the PSX/PS2's market away to be meaningful. 500K may sound like a lot, but didn't Dreamcast sold a bunch at launch too? When you're dealing with a market where the size is measured in tens of millions, the first day blitz doesn't mean anything unless it can be sustained.
I wouldn't go so far to say Microsoft's strategy was to keep a low profile (they did have stuff in New York and stuff), but I don't see this hurting them that much, either. If you assume you take a loss of $100 on a system and you make back say $20 per game after development costs, you've to sell 5 games per system to just break even, and since royalty is fairly small, that means you've to sell 5 first-party games to break even. I mean yeah, Nintendo has a very strong first-party, so they can sell really low and try to get it back later, but Microsoft isn't exactly a strong first party developer. It makes sense to avoid excessive losses at launch if you can't expect to recover it easily.
Make no mistake, the reason why GC sold a lot is because it's cheap. But the one that lowers the price first doesn't always win. Sony is not changing the price on PSX2, and I don't see Microsoft changing anytime soon. If Nintendo can't capture a large chunk of the market, they may dig themselves into a hole. Well, I guess Nintendo never cares, because they've license to print money in Zelda/Meteroid/Pokemon/etc, but the 3rd party developers sure won't like that.</div>
