The absolute and resounding failure of Google Stadia not only adds to a long list of Google products that have not worked -they even have a website dedicated to it-, but it also adds to that unattractive list of consoles or platforms that do not they penetrated among the public.
At Softonic we get down to work and bring you those platforms that were a failure for their companies, such as Wii U or the aforementioned Google Stadia.
Nokia N-Gage
It should be noted that in this article we are not going to talk about bad products, be very careful with that. We want to refer to those devices that did not succeed in sales, beyond the fact that what they offered could, on the other hand, be very good. We make this paragraph, which we consider really important, because it exemplifies well the case of Nokia N-Gage.
In October 2003, Nokia was the great dominator of the mobile phone market. If you wanted a mobile phone, you would most likely take a Nokia. And with good reason: they were good, they worked as a scandal and on top of that they were hard as a stone.
The Scandinavian company decided to mix portable consoles with mobile phones, and that’s where Nokia N-Gage was born. This hybrid was capable of running great games like Call of Duty, Virtua Tennis or Rayman 3. Despite its benefits at the hardware level -it was a tremendous machine, and here we are talking about experience to test it at the time-, the console did not catch on with the public and barely three million were sold worldwide, a very poor figure that it caused Nokia not to bet more on it.
Apple Pippin
The famous manzanita also entered the world of consoles, but unlike what was achieved with iPhone, iPad or Mac, its premiere was one of Apple’s biggest failures.
Apple Pippin only produced about 100.000 units in 1995, a figure that they did not even sell, since the figure remained between 30.000 and 50.000 units. In other words, half of the stock was never sold. Competing with PlayStation or SEGA Saturn was not easy…
3DO Interactive Multiplayer
When you talk about “failures” at the level of consoles, platforms, etc., 3DO Interactive Multiplayer always appears. It is impossible for it not to appear on a list, since it exemplifies well how the public is not capable of understanding what is being offered.
Created by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, the idea is that 3DO was a kind of license that third parties could take advantage of to create their models. In this way, Panasonic was the first to acquire the rights to 3DO in 1993, which was then followed by GoldStar (now LG) and Sanyo. Each company published their own versions, but the failure was widespread.
3DO was a great console that took advantage of the CD-ROM as a storage medium in video games before PlayStation popularized it. However, its excessive price (almost 700 dollars at that time) weighed heavily on manufacturers. Up to two million units were produced, but only four years after manufacturing the first one from the company, its life was terminated.
psx
Although the initials of psx have remained to designate the first PlayStation, the reality is that psx was a very different console. Behind this name was a PlayStation 2 that included a digital video recorder. This was its strong point: not only did you have what a PS2 could do, but also a series of audiovisual extras designed for the most gourmets.
Launched in 2003, its commercialization never left the Japanese borders, since the manufacturing cost was really high. Although there are no exact figures, it is only known that the console was a true failure at the sales level, which caused Sony to cease production just two years after launching it on the market.
Ouya
Announced in the summer of 2012 through a Kickstarter, this console was very well received among first-time users. In fact, they asked for 950.000 dollars in crowdfunding and raised more than two million dollars in just 24 hours. When the campaign closed, the amount was over $85 million. a nonsense.
His journey, to top it off, was not bad, since in 2015 it was acquired by the important Razer. However, in 2019 it announced the closure of all related activity after four years of really bad sales. Ouya was more smoke than reality, since the policy of free video games with a payment component was diluted.
Wii U
The biggest failure in the history of Nintendo in terms of consoles is concerned: Wii U. why did it fail? Well, we could say that for a host of things, but the main one was that it was never well communicated among the public about what Wii U really was. Was it a Wii 2? Was it a wii addon? Was it a review of the Wii as such?
Despite the fact that the catalog of games was quite good -and proof of this is that almost all of them have ended up coming to Nintendo Switch-, Wii U barely managed 135 million units sold worldwide, the console that has sold the least had Nintendo throughout its history.
Google Stadia
And we close this compilation with Google Stadia itself. It was launched on the market at the end of 2019 and at the beginning of 2022 it was communicating its closure for January 18, 2023, the day we are on today.
If you want to know more about Google Stadia, see the post dedicated to it.
