PAOerfulone said:
Lawlight said:
We always expected a Nintendo-majority forum to pick the NES but its success was mostlyluck and Nintendo could not sustain that success with the SNES. I maintain that gaming as we know it today has survived thanks to PlayStation. A small market could never have sustained the cost of games development without that expansion. |
This is, without a doubt, the biggest load of bull I have read since joining this site.
Mostly luck? How was Nintendo anymore lucky with the NES than Sony was with the PlayStation?
And the reason why the SNES didn't do the same numbers is because Sega kickstarted the 4th generation by releasing the Genesis much earlier - October 1988 in Japan, August 1989 in the North America, August to November 1990 everywhere else. The SNES? November 1990 in Japan, August 1991 in North America, April to September 1992 everywhere else.
Sega had a 2 year headstart over Nintendo. Giving them all the time they needed to amass a larger library of games over them, stealing a chunk of their install base. Like how Microsoft took nearly half of Sony's from the Xbox/PS2 generation into the 360/PS3 generation. If you think that having a headstart is insignificant, you're kidding yourself. And the SNES still soundly defeated the Genesis in the end.
And you have an odd definition of "small". Using the numbers that zorg1000 pointed out:
Worldwide market:
3rd Generation - NES/Master System/Atari 7800=~75 million
4th Generation - SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx=~100 million
5th Generation - PS1/N64/Saturn=~140 million
America
3rd Generation - NES era=~40 million
4th Generation - SNES era=~50 million
5th Generation - PS1 era=~60 million
Japan
NES era=~20 million
SNES era=~25 million
PS1 era=~30 million
Europe
NES/Master System era=under 20 million
SNES/Genesis era= under 20 million
PS1 era=~45 million
By the time the PlayStation entered the scene, console gaming was already very popular, more popular than it had ever been at that point. Sony is responsible for the explosion of the European console market, which they absolutely deserve credit for, as well as standardizing CDs as the main format for games and video game consoles as multimedia devices. For that, I consider the PlayStation to be the 2nd most important system in video games... but a distant 2nd. It was the NES that saved the American console market from the crash of 1983, created the Japanese console market (opening the door for what are now PlayStation centric franchises that were/are mostly popular in Japan like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, both of which started on NES.) During that period, playing video games was called "playing Nintendo".
If there was no Nintendo Entertainment System, there would be no PlayStation.
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I'll come back to this post but some corrections:
3rd generation for the 3 consoles = 77.48M
4th generation for the 3 consoles = 92.75M (don't round it up to 100M)
5th generation for the 3 consoles = 144.68M (don't round it down to 140M)
So the newcomer, the PS1 outsold the whole of the previous generation by itself. Sony wasn't lucky to enter a market with no competitor like the NES.
