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Forums - Sony Discussion - PlayStation Classic is out & receiving "Do Not Buy" recommendations (did Sony even develop it themselves?) *updated 12/5/18

KratosLives on 11 November 2018

maybe if it came with 50 or a 100 games, i'd consider.



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NightDragon83 on 11 November 2018

Obviously with alot of big 3rd party titles on the PS1 it was going to be tough for Sony to find the right balance on the console since it only contains 20 games, but some of the choices and lack of key 1st party games really make the console a tough sell. They'd be better off just offering some "PS1 Classics" collection bundle on the PS4 for the holidays.



On 2/24/13, MB1025 said:
You know I was always wondering why no one ever used the dollar sign for $ony, but then I realized they have no money so it would be pointless.

Rainbow Yoshi on 11 November 2018

The SNES Classic has a far better library than this, only 5 or 6 games make me interested in the PlayStation Classic. I think all this is convincing me to do is buy the SNES Classic and try out many of the systems games that I sadly missed out on by not being born yet.

Last edited by Rainbow Yoshi - on 11 November 2018

thismeintiel on 11 November 2018
DreadPirateRoberts said:
thismeintiel said:

Of course it grew the market.  Much more than when it was basically just Nintendo and Sega in the mix.  During the NES era, the two top consoles sold ~75M consoles combined, with the top console selling ~62M.  The following gen, ~80M total, with the top console selling just ~49M.  A growth of just 5M units, hardly anything to tout. 

The PS1 pushed gaming into the mainstream.  It wasn't just a relatively niche hobby, it was a cool activity for all.  It became the first console to sell 100M+ units, minus the Gameboy, which had little competition and was allowed to stay on the market for 12 years before the GBA launched.  The total for the top two consoles jumped from ~80M to 135M, a huge growth of 55M units.  It even grew to the point where the 3rd place could sell almost 10M, a first.  PS expanded the market even more so during the PS2 era, where the top two consoles sold a combined 182M, another huge growth of 48M.  And 3rd place actually sold 20M+.

So, yea, Sony and the PS deserve a lot of credit for making the industry the size it is today.

I can only half agree.  Sony and the PS1 certainly helped fuel a continued growth of the market - and as already noted, cashed in heavily on the collapse of PC gaming in Europe.  The PS1 (and then PS2) were definitely critical releases that helped the market move forward. Where I disagree is the claim that the PS1 made gaming mainstream.  In North America, the credit for that goes to Atari, and then to Nintendo for rescuing the industry from the ashes of Atari's flame-out.  The PS1 was just a continuation of growth.  Likewise in Japan, gaming had been mainstream for years and had taken no notice of the crash that decimated the North American market.

Also, lol at "it was the first to sell 100 million if you ignore the device that beat it to 100 million."  

There was definitely a difference in a system selling ~20M in the US and one that sells 40M+.  While gaming wasn't the smallest market, there is no denying the PS1 launched gaming into a much larger spread in the US and EU, both in terms of sales and mainstream conscience. This is also around the time we saw a large increase in gaming media to follow that expansion of interest.

Well, if PS1 had no competition and was on the market for 12 years before the PS2, I'm sure it could have achieved the same numbers the PS2 did, if not more.  Context is key.  Of course, PS1, at the time, easily beat the Gameboy for the fastest to 100M. 



 

Snoopy on 11 November 2018

PS1 games don't hold up to snes games because it is too blocky.



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Rainbow Yoshi on 11 November 2018

Even still, there are plenty classics like Tomb-Raider, Crash, Spyro, Rayman 2, Gran Turismo, Chrono Cross, Castlevania: Sympthony of the Night, Silent Hill etc. that would have made both systems comparable. But I know what you mean about blocky graphics. I think Crash and Spyro benefited from using non-human based characters compared to say Final Fantasy VII, which has aged quite poorly. 

Last edited by Rainbow Yoshi - on 13 November 2018

Zoombael on 12 November 2018

What to expect for 99.99.

 

Shadow1980 said:
twintail said:

I am not really sure what part of TL;DR, the PlayStation succeeded because Nintendo screwed up means much else. I know you say 3rd party support but that ties directly into you saying that Nintendo not choosing CDs was the screwup that let Sony win, so essentially your argument is unchanged. Sony sticking with CDs was them being proactive, but it wasn't the only proactive steps they took to undermine Nintendo, which I have already mentioned. There is no need to revise history here. PS1s success is due to the moves Sony made to break into the market. Nintendo's complacency doesn't detract that. 

I guess that statement was rather poorly phrased. My bad.

The point is, Sony's massive success wasn't entirely due to their own efforts. Yes, they did a lot of right things, and they could have made it competitive even without having the lion's share of third-party exclusives. It was only trailing the N64 by about 20% for the Jan.-Aug. period of 1997 in the U.S., which shows potential for filling in Sega's old spot as a close competitor to Nintendo even had they lacked big exclusive killer apps like Final Fantasy VII. But the competition wasn't even close for the generation as a whole. It was a total blowout in Sony's favor. And it was Nintendo's choice to go with carts that resulted in that generation being so lopsided. "Sony dominated because Nintendo screwed up" is a better summation of my original point.

Everyone else but Sony screwed up. Atari, Sega, 3DO, Nintendo... three of which chose CD format.



Hunting Season is done...

kopstudent89 on 12 November 2018
twintail said:
Shadow1980 said:

I guess that statement was rather poorly phrased. My bad.

The point is, Sony's massive success wasn't entirely due to their own efforts. Yes, they did a lot of right things, and they could have made it competitive even without having the lion's share of third-party exclusives. It was only trailing the N64 by about 20% for the Jan.-Aug. period of 1997 in the U.S., which shows potential for filling in Sega's old spot as a close competitor to Nintendo even had they lacked big exclusive killer apps like Final Fantasy VII. But the competition wasn't even close for the generation as a whole. It was a total blowout in Sony's favor. And it was Nintendo's choice to go with carts that resulted in that generation being so lopsided. "Sony dominated because Nintendo screwed up" is a better summation of my original point.

 

I suppose if you believe this rather simplified and narrow-minded explanation of history, you are more than welcome to .

Obviously Nintendo's screw up was a factor that lead many 3rd party titles to jump to Sony's console, most notably FF7 which would have definitely made the N64 a lot more competitive particularly in Japan. 

It was more than that though. Nintendo wanted to protect their first party titles so their approach with 3rd parties was famously known to be harsh where as Sony were very open to all third parties and made sure they would succeed. Sony at the time obviously didn't make games so they made sure third parties were on board. 

You can also add the fact that Sony made cooler games that targetted an older market for the first time in such a scale. 

Really there's a whole lot of factors, like with everything, that usually sways the domination like that.



KLXVER on 12 November 2018

Yeah, this thread is over. Nintendo made better products with the NES and SNES Classic and Sony earned their success with the PS1. Don't know why this is even argued...



Mandalore76 on 12 November 2018
thismeintiel said:
Mandalore76 said:

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.

Of course it grew the market.  Much more than when it was basically just Nintendo and Sega in the mix.  During the NES era, the two top consoles sold ~75M consoles combined, with the top console selling ~62M.  The following gen, ~80M total, with the top console selling just ~49M.  A growth of just 5M units, hardly anything to tout. 

The PS1 pushed gaming into the mainstream.  It wasn't just a relatively niche hobby, it was a cool activity for all.  It became the first console to sell 100M+ units, minus the Gameboy, which had little competition and was allowed to stay on the market for 12 years before the GBA launched.  The total for the top two consoles jumped from ~80M to 135M, a huge growth of 55M units.  It even grew to the point where the 3rd place could sell almost 10M, a first.  PS expanded the market even more so during the PS2 era, where the top two consoles sold a combined 182M, another huge growth of 48M.  And 3rd place actually sold 20M+.

So, yea, Sony and the PS deserve a lot of credit for making the industry the size it is today.

Video Game Consoles sold by Gen in millions:
2nd Gen - 38.5m (Atari 2600 30m, Intellivision 3m, Odyssey2 2m, ColecoVision 2m, Atari 5200 1m, Fairchild Channel F .25m
3rd Gen -  84.01m (NES 61.91m, Sega Master System 17.8m, Atari 7800 4.3m)
4th Gen -  100.78m (SNES 49.1m, Sega Genesis 39.7m, Turbo Grafx 16/PC Engine 10m, Phillips CD-I 1m, Neo Geo .98m)
5th Gen -  147.51m (PS1 102.49, N64 32.93m, Sega Saturn 9.26m, 3DO 2m, Atari Jaguar .25m, Amiga CD32 .10m, PC-FX .40m, FM Towns Marty .045m, Apple Bandai Pippin .042m)

A couple of things flat out wrong with what you said.  First of all, Sony didn't expand the video game market in a way hitherto previously unseen.  3rd Generation Console Sales saw a 54% increase over the 2nd Gen when the NES entered the market.  The increase of 5th Generation Console Sales over 4th Generation was only 32%.  So no, while Sony sucked up more market share in the 5th Gen thanks to Nintendo and Sega both stumbling simultaneously rather than one or the other, the PlayStation's arrival did not expand the market more dramatically than when the NES entered the scene 2 gens previously.  To further prove this, the NES as a market leader had 51% higher sales than the previous gen's market leader, the 2600.  The original PlayStation as market leader saw 52% higher sales than the previous gen's market leader, the SNES.  That's only a 1% higher increase, so again, not the massively never seen before increase you describe.

*By the way, the Sega Genesis is notoriously under-tracked.  But, even if you use the smaller # of 33.75m sales, the increase of 5th Gen over 6th Gen sales would still be only 36%.  So, still far less than the 54% increase from 3rd Gen over 2nd Gen when NES entered the market.  Here is my source for the more likely Genesis total:

This brings the total sold worldwide to around 39.7 million.

http://segatastic.blogspot.com/2009/12/mega-drive-sales-figures-update.html

2nd, your claim that Sony increased the video game market in such a dramatic fashion that even the 3rd best selling console was able to sell almost 10 million units is a complete fallacy.  In the 4th Gen, prior to Sony's entrance to the market, the Turbo Grafx 16/PC Engine sold 10 million units, coming in 3rd in sales for that gen.  That's more than the Sega Saturn sold in the 5th Gen.  So in actuality, the 3rd Place console performed better prior to Sony's entrance in the marketplace.  Not, Sony making video gaming so mainstream that the 3rd place console seller performed better than any other time in previous history as you claim.