I'm not sure exactly what ur asking in that first sentence, could u rephrase it or elaborate please

And I'm also not sure what ur getting at with the rest of the post, I already gave Sony credit for greatly expanding the console market outside of America/Japan. Without them it's entirely possible home consoles would never have caught on like they did in Europe and developing countries, with handhelds & home computers being the preferred choice instead.

If PS was not so successful Xbox would have taken their place.

There are quite a few PC gamers but the average person is not interested in PC gaming. If consoles didnt exist then those people would play on tablets not PCs

My main issue with Steam is allowing all the pre-alpha dribble on there store. Releasing a game at early Beta is fine.... Pre-Alpha? Not so much.....

I do not think the majority of people understand that the average gamer does not want to be a PC gamer. For some of us we love it but the majority do not want to deal with it. I personally prefer my PS3/4 to PC but I play a lot of games on PC (Civ V/Beyond Earth lately :) )

"a vast majority of console gamers prefer playing games on a gamepad."

what do you think the wii mote + nunchuck is?

"The core gamers Wii had early on jumped ship"

Absolutely wrong. software sales prove it.

"Also, the Wii has faded into obscurity more quickly than its competitors inspite of superior console sales"

wii stopped selling when it stopped getting new releases. and there's no point in ignoring the slow start of the competitors.

you can see if a game is alpha or not on steam, just dont buy the alphas...

the average console gamer is a casual gamer, thats why they are fine with things like no mod support and that why they think gaming isnt in a crisis.  we havnt seen new game modes or genres or goo new features last gen, all we got is day1 dlc and smaller games for a gen.

thats why so many people are raging about sw battlefront. the game is much smaller and has alot less features than Battlefront 2.  a gap of 1 gen and nothing is bigger or new, they just cut cut cut.  just like they did with other games.

Rampant speculation.  Being the company that did to something, and being the only company possible that could have done something are two very different things.  There was no gaming crisis in the early 90's for Sony to have saved the entire industry from, therefore there is no reason to conclude that home video gaming as we know it would have disappeared without them being in the market.  That's what we know.  What you are proposing is a "What If?" question.  It is impossible to prove an answer to a "What If?" question, because of the very fact that it never happened.  You are stating "no one could have done it but Sony" as an absolute.  An absolute answer cannot exist in a reality that does not exist in the first place.

Yes without PS the industry would consider itself tanking atm after the great previous years of late

foxtail said: padib said: Were Sony not there, Nintendo would have had a CD-based system long before the N64, with the games today being much better in general. I think if there was no Playstation and no Sony/Nintendo partnership in its inception, that a Nintendo CD system would exist today.   Nintendo was planning on having a CD based system after the SNES and saw the future advantages of CD technology. There were 3 major players when it came to optical disc based drives back then, i.e. Philips, Sony and Panasonic.   If Sony was out of the picture and Nintendo needed a partner, they would likely be choosing between Philips and Panasonic.   In the end Nintendo did partner with Panasonic to produce its disc drives and proprietary discs for the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U.   The final design of Playstation controller was also born from SNES design, looking at Sony's initial controller designs they were way different.   If Nintendo didn't feel the need to differentiate itself from the Playstation controller, its own cotroller would've been an evolution of the SNES controller.   Instead Nintendo came up with controller that was radically different from SNES design, especially in how you held it and how spread out it was.   Overall if there was no Playstation, Nintendo's natural trajectory and evolution would be much different, but history is not what was - it's what is.

Great post.

I think without Sony, Nintendo would have found another partner for a CD based console and released it. SEGA would have fared much better with the Saturn, and the industry would have been fine. Gaming became more "mainstream" simply by natural progression of life. Old school gamers in the 70's, 80's, early 90's get old and have kids. You now have more gamers.

Feature or tech wise, I can't think of anything Sony did that no one else would have done. Others did disc based gaming. Others already had done analog. Others had already done online gaming. Bluray or another HD media was a natural progression.

The industry would look different without Sony. LOL @ the idea that it would be in a "crisis".

I am talking about the rate of change from one generation to the next as in the overall sales opposed (the escalation) to the impact individually from Sony (in said generation). How many consoles were sold overall and individually between the existing companies before Sony arrived? How how did the overall console industry grow since they stepped in? That is how you see their true impact. If it continues to grow it means their impact was positive. With Sony...you'll find that the industry actually grew because they got people who were interested in multimedia to meld themselves into gaming. The got a two in one deal. Microsoft took over for Sega essentially and essentially halved what Sony built. If you look up the sales from generation to generation you'll find this is somewhat accurate.

padib said: foxtail said: I think if there was no Playstation and no Sony/Nintendo partnership in its inception, that a Nintendo CD system would exist today.   Nintendo was planning on having a CD based system after the SNES and saw the future advantages of CD technology. There were 3 major players when it came to optical disc based drives back then, i.e. Philips, Sony and Panasonic.   If Sony was out of the picture and Nintendo needed a partner, they would likely be choosing between Philips and Panasonic.   In the end Nintendo did partner with Panasonic to produce its disc drives and proprietary discs for the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U.   The final design of Playstation controller was also born from SNES design, looking at Sony's initial controller designs they were way different.   If Nintendo didn't feel the need to differentiate itself from the Playstation controller, its own cotroller would've been an evolution of the SNES controller.   Instead Nintendo came up with controller that was radically different from SNES design, especially in how you held it and how spread out it was.   Overall if there was no Playstation, Nintendo's natural trajectory and evolution would be much different, but history is not what was - it's what is. My post was based on that information, and I'm glad you made a complete post describing more elaborately what I concluded from the same data. Hats off.

Thats a cop out. If Nintendo would've made a CD based console they still would've held back third parties and hammered Sega into the ground. Historically Sega was on a downward spiral. The Genesis was the peak of Segas time and that was while Nintendo was keeping developers from them. Sega of America was specifically incompetent and a very big part of why Sega fell. Sega as it stands today has only been credited with what Platinum Games makes since the arcade era died off. That was essentially their life support until they soured their relationship with third parties by rushing the Sega Saturn and pissing off third parties.

Sony actually made life easier for third parties. Third parties sell the most consoles due to their content so they should have a place at the table, not groveling at Nintendos feet and sure as hell not waiting on Sega because they could never catch up to Nintendo. Sony provided the media, they provided the funding and made it easier for partnerships to be accomplished and thats why the mass exodus of third party came to them.  I used to be on Nintendos side until I actually did the research. I still love their product, but Nintendo has issues and Sega not even being able to function as a third party just shows how bad they suck at managing a brand. Now they can barely fund console games anymore and no one did that to them. No one forced them to be so niche.