Shadow1980 said:
No console ever crossed the 100M mark prior to the PS1 because in the 8-bit & 16-bit eras Europe largely ignored consoles in favor of home computers like the Amiga and Atari ST. The NES, SNES, Master System, and Mega Drive combined sold only about 32 million units in Europe, vs. at least 70M in the U.S. and 41M in Japan. Overall, Europe was only about 20% of the global console market, far smaller than they are now (about 37% or so since Gen 6). The PS1 sold 100M because it had dominant market share in every region, including Europe which finally decided to adopt consoles en masse after the home computer market collapsed in the mid 90s. If the N64 had been CD-based, it could very well have been the first to sell over 100M. Or maybe no system would have ever sold over 100M.
Sony didn't so much push gaming forward as pick up the ball and score when Nintendo dropped it. Sony's own first-party efforts were severely lacking at the time, with Gran Turismo being the only real blockbuster IP they had, and the PS1 almost totally depended on third parties. Sony's only real contribution was having the foresight to realize that discs were the format of the future, and the competence to not completely screw everything up like Sega did with the Saturn. After that, it was all because Nintendo decided to go with cartridges, causing many major Japanese publishers to put their full support behind the PS1. Had the N64 been CD-based, the console market would have continued growing as it already was beforehand. Nintendo would have seen the value in continuing to make conventional hardware with sufficient power and the latest mainstream format. PlayStation would have survived and simply filled the role Sega once did. The U.S. market would have likely been reasonably competitive in following generations. Japan... maybe not, but PlayStation as a Japanese console brand would still have at least a somewhat healthy presence. And Europe would have mass-adopted consoles anyway, with the only likely difference being that PlayStation wouldn't be the utterly dominant brand there. MS may or may not have made Xbox, and even if they didn't whatever market share they'd have cannibalized would simply be dispersed back to Nintendo and Sony for the most part, leaving us with a "Big Two" situation where the two HD giants were Nintendo and PlayStation, with no unconventional systems like the Wii, Wii U, and Switch having ever come to pass as a result. Over time, I think Sony might have eroded Nintendo's market share as the systems' capabilities likely would have started to reach greater parity and more and more third-party series become multiplatform, as they did starting in Gen 6 in our reality. I think we could have very well seen a situation like this: I'm assuming Sega follows the same trajectory, Xbox never comes into being, and the Japanese market still shrinks in Gen 7.
Nobody has yet to prove that Nintendo's policies, which had already been relaxed when the SNES debuted, was the primary factor driving third parties to jump ship PlayStation. Meanwhile, we have sufficient evidence to establish that Nintendo lost key support because of the N64's cartridge format. It's really that simple. |
Except we have the very big evidence that even during SNES era they lost a lot of exclusiviness and some even jumped ship to Genesis. So it isn't far fetched to imagine that Nintendo would still have lost majorly even with CD. Just look how much fuck they gave to third parties in N64, GC and Wii.
We keep pretending Nintendo sole mistake was to chose a format while Sega made a lot of mistakes and Sony was dumb luck, but that is being reducionist.
duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363
Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994
Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."