pokoko said:
Kind of. I mean, It wouldn't have been such a smash hit had the competition not been terrible. Still, hindsight is 20/20 and in reality the PS1 changed the landscape of gaming and allowed it to grow like never before with the greatest library of games ever to hit a console, and by a wide margin. In that regard, its spot in history is probably underrated. |
Did it really though? Video gaming was expanding Gen over Gen before Sony's entrance into the market. Whenever a competitor stumbles, someone always fills more of the void than if there was a healthy environment. When Atari, Coleco, and Mattel all got hit by the North American Video Game Crash, Nintendo stepped in and absorbed all of their sales, plus whatever part of the market they might have had anyway. Once Sega got a foothold in the marketplace, the SNES had to split sales with the Genesis that the NES hadn't had to face the previous gen. But the SNES having less sales than the NES doesn't mean the video game market contracted. It expanded. When Nintendo stumbled by sticking to cartridges with the N64, and Sega made their mistakes leading to the Saturn launch, Sony sucked in sales from 2 competitors simultaneously. It's easy to look at the PlayStation's sales in a vacuum and say "Sony introduced 100 million people to video games that weren't there before", but that's a gross over-estimation of what happened. Each successive gen has a wider consumer pool of potential sales to go after. If Nintendo had switched to discs, they wouldn't have lost Square and the Final Fantasy series, among other 3rd party support, and the N64 would have taken back some of the sales it lost to the PlayStation. If Sega hadn't made the mistakes they made as well, the division of console sales would have been more even among the 3, more like what we saw in the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 gen just recently.
edit - I also don't think the PlayStation library is dramatically more impressive than the NES library. Not by a wide margin, or any margin to be honest.
Last edited by Mandalore76 - on 09 November 2018
