| jarrod said: lol. So much revisionist history, it's making my head spin! Okay, basically PS1 sold roughly about as much as NES did in the US and Japan. Sony's real inroads into driving their userbase (and the console market in general) was in Europe, and there they largely cannibalized Europe's established and diverse computer gaming industry anyway (R.I.P. Amiga, Spectrum, Commodore, etc). |
This basically ends the thread. As well, above I gave numbers for NES vs PS1 penetrations rates in US, which are roughly the same. The market that was hugely expanded (can't say established, 4th gen console war did that) by Sony is Europe. PS brand cannibalized every other form of gaming in that area at the time.
//From personal experienece I can say that PS brand was popular outside of regular US, Europe, Japan regions as well, though I doubt BRIC countries contributed that much to growth, but still. When I was a kid, the system that opened the market and made it way bigger than enthusiast, computer nerds and Spectrum fans world was Dendy, a well-build Famiclone. Before that there were only computer geeks, since Spectrums were never legally imported in USSR, all Soviet ZX Spectrums were literally hand-made, build around Z80 CPU (just like mine, my dad made it for me). Then there was SMD vs. SNES war, SNES failed poorly due to high price points and completely no piracy. SMD systems cost cheaper, SMD hardware clones cost even less, chinese bootleg carts were sold everywhere and cost few times cheaper than awesome-looking, packaged in cardboard SNES carts and the system was "cool" enough, so teens go crazy about it. Then PS1 came, who were playing it? Well, the same used to be a kid, now teenagers =)
