Alt Removed, Carl

Alt Removed, Carl

You're talking about Sony and Square (who still developed games with Nintendo--just not on the N64).  I'm talking about consumers.  Sony went in a more mature direction....that Sega had already been going in for ages.  Sony's initial success had a lot to do with the competition screwing up. Third parties go where the money is.  If the N64 had the dominance that the NES or SNES had, would Square have jumped ship? 

IMO it comes down to a bunch of different things. Power, value, running multiplats best out of all consoles (which is important to most gamers). Playstation is synonymous with gaming now and the brand carries a lot of weight globally, more in the home console market than the competition does. PS4 is less about gimmicks and more about having a great gaming platform. It also has plenty of multimedia features that suite that audience.

The console has a small form factor in relation to it's nearest competition, plus the controller is very comfortable and very fit for the purpose of the games being designed for it.

Sony's 1st party developers are well know for their quality and the brand is also known to put out great variety and quantity to boot. As much as people like to say otherwise Sony has announced a lot of exclusives for people to look forward to, the majority of those just haven't been from 1st party studios yet and Playstation doesn't have a history of losing exclusivity to other platforms.
There's no shortage of games either exclusive or multiplats.

Popularity also brings greater appeal, which in turn pushes sales even harder and all of these things combined are very much an unstoppable force for mass market appeal.

The missteps of Sony's competition also has an effect on the overall image of the system and brand as a whole.
TBH I think anything you can think about as a positive for Sony or negative for it's competition is why PS4 is as popular as it is.

Multiple reasons:

1. Consumer satisfaction from the previous generation. The 360 had very few popular games for the last few years of its life while the PS3 was still releasing strong exclusives like The Last of Us, God of War Ascensions, etc. Consumers recognize the full support throughout the lifecycle and want the most bang for their buck.

2. Bad publicity from the competition. Microsoft's restrictions and their plan going forward was not received well by the gaming community and therefore was not shown in a favorable light in the media. Sony was.

3. Price. Don't really need to say this but $100 cheaper for a console that is supposed to be a tad more powerful just screams a better buy.

Alt Removed, Carl

I have no idea, not even Shuhei Yoshida knows why.

point #5 is a big reason I swtiched to PS4. So annoying to see PS3 gamers get so many awesome games and new IPs while I'm getting a prequel to gears of wars (the fact that I hate prequels in almost all forms of entertainment didn't help).

95% of it is price, ho wait, I'll go with better version of the major third party games, better support world wide, decent first party offering and very bright future, better hardware and the best online

Im not discrediting Sony. The PS4 is a great system, but game wise its probably the weakest of the three atm...