| wholikeswood said: I don't feel this analogy is entirely congruous with the current generation battle. In that generation, the PS1 was a new breed but all 3 companies were still targetting the same 'traditional gamer' market. In the current generation, the Wii is a new breed but crucially it's also aimed at the new 'casual gamer' market, which is severalfold larger than the PS3 & 360's 'traditional gamer' market. And that's also why in an ideal world I'd define it all as: 'Wii is king of the casual market' and '360 is king of the traditional market with the PS3 currently a close second', so as to make the distinction. I guess it's like: ABBA (Wii) vs. Jay-Z (PS3) vs. Nas (360). I wouldn't feel comfortable calling ABBA the 'king of music' for selling more albums. The rap market is much smaller than the market ABBA was appealing to, so I'd call ABBA the king of their market and say 'Nas is king of the rap market with Jay-Z currently a close second'. (I know nothing about rap though, so don't take my ranking of Jigga and Nas to heart if you're a big rap fan; just using as an example). I shall now prepare to be flamed for coming ambiguously close to saying 'PS3 & 360 aren't competing with the Wii'. I know that on graph-paper they are competing. I just feel they draw from different markets. |
I wasn't trying to use the N64/PS1/SS generation as a direct comparison with the SS/N64 as Sony/MS. I was only making the comparison of current-day Sony to past-day Nintendo and Sega - both companies went into the 64bit generation with high hopes (especially Sega) and got totally trounced in every imaginable way....Much in the way that Sony has.
And the problem with arguing that PS1 was trying to capture the 'traditional market' was that what we currently define the traditional market, was not the traditional market then. The traditional market of the early 1990's were entirely based off of kids and some teens - Sega made a killing targeting younger white teen males, while Nintendo had younger fare, and did a little bit for the older teens as well.
But the Playstation 1 made it relevant to everyone inside those age brackets, and outside of them, and made gaming more socially acceptible - in the same way that the Wii is doing it today (and the DS did for females about 3 years ago for handhelds). You can't go from generations selling ~80 million consoles to ~150 million and just assume the same brackets are buying video game systems - they weren't.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
