Is OP actually saying ps1 sold so well was because ppl were buying them to play their music on them? Wow.

And the whole ps2 dvd thing really only applied in the first year or so since there weren’t a whole lot of games to play after launch.

They both sold so well not because of “fads”, but because they had games no one else had. Gran turismo, MGS, FF, crash bandicoot, tomb raider, silent hill, tekken, and many more. PlayStation was seen as the “cool” or “hip” product to have.

PS3 only suffered so much because of the cell processor and blu Ray drive. It made it very hard to develop for and as a result, many third party games performed better on 360 and some were even exclusive to Microsoft’s box. Plus it made Sony have to charge $599 for it, despite still taking a loss on every unit sold. PS3 not selling up to PS1/PS2’s standards had very little to nothing to do with blu Ray.

Its all marketing. Always been that way.

I'm not taking away from the Wii's library and motion control contribution. But by fad, I mean a craze that made it sell. As in, take away motion controls and you're left with a console hardly more powerful than the Gamecube that would have sold even less than the Gamecube. Motion controls were executed properly with the Wii and Nintendo managed to develop fantastic games around it, but it was something new that pretty much single handedly sold the console.

When I say fad, I mean something that generates a craze that probably couldn't be repeated using the same formula. Sometimes resulting in a steep decline once the craze is 'over'. Sounds like the Wii to me. Again, the Wii was great.

Would CD's/DVD's really be considered a fad though?

The idea is that a fad is something that primarily drives a products success and could not be repeated using the same formula. So there are those who think the PS2 sold like it did because it was a DVD player, if that was true then the DVD was it's fad because a DVD player is never going to be a selling point in a game console again. The same can be said for Wii and motion controls.

Optical media allow for lots of data for a low price. This is still true today, as Switch shows. In PS1/PS2-era that informed the choice of many third-party to go to Playstation and may have influenced the games itself (more data allowed for higher details and more content). So the advantage of optical media is still present, it is not a fad.

PS1 and PS2 did not only sell because they played CD's and DVDs. You're not old enough to remember that though and have only gone off the things you've been told, so it's ok that you made that mistake.

Those two consoles sold because they offered a library of games that were popular at that time. The PS2 had such a lock on third party games that not having one meant missing out on GTA... yeah... just think about that for a second. There was a time when a single console had GTA as an exclusive.

And if you go back further, Atari, NES, SNES and Genesis didn't have a "fad" either. So no, the PS4 isn not unique in that regard. The reason it sold so well is because Microsoft foolishly tried to fuck us all over with their no-used-games bullshit and the people at Sony were intelligent enough to grab ahold of the anger and run with it to their advantage. After that, the rest was easy and it all just snowballed into place.

Ps1,ps2, and ps4 did good because of good library not because of some gimmicks like motion control or dvd player.ps3 could have been the best selling console last gen but due to that unnecessary bluray player it never reached its sale potential like a PlayStation.it was a disaster.sony should have dropped that console after a year or two and moved to a new gen.Nintendo did that with wiiu and its working fine for them.but on the bright side ps4 selling good without any gimmicks and holding well against the competition.

This. Microsoft's huge fuck up at the beginning played a huge role in the PS4's start and how fast it gained momentum. Just look at Sony's E3 2013 and all the other stuff like the "How to borrow games" video they made, they used it to their advantage as much as possible because even they knew that Microsoft's terrible reveal event for the Xbox One gave them an easy start and advantage for the PS4 because all they had to say was "well we're not doing that stuff" that Microsoft said they were doing before they reversed it a while later. 

It's not the only reason PS4 has been doing well obviously, but it did play a big part in how quickly the PS4 took off.