| Avinash_Tyagi said:
Yes population growth isn't that fast, but it affects the demographic that was being targeted by the videogame industry the most and we can see that it accounts for most of the growth between the NES and the PS perfectly, remember its about which age group is affected the most, the young, and while you can argue that multiple console ownership is small, its not as small as you seem to believe, and does play an affect on sales, and the N64/PS era was when it became a bigger factor, in addition you also failed to take into account that the NES also had competition just like the PS did (the gaming PCs, master system, even the arcades might be arguable as competitiors at that time)
Again your argument is flawed because you fail to take into account the competitors to the NES, you are trying to show growth to the market without taking into account gaming on the PC's for example, this is why your argument is flawed you seem to think that the NES launched in a Vacuum without any competition and that is why its numbers were so large when in fact nothing is farther from the truth, the market in 1985 was much larger than just the NES, however by the PS era the influence of gaming on PC's had declined |
Of course the analysis is flawed, its a ten minute analysis. I could come up with dozens of problems with it. Unfortunately, I'm unwilling to spend three months deriving relevant data and variables and running hundreds of regressions to determine the effects of those variables. That said, the analysis I provided gives a reasonably good account of the situation and yes it does ignore some things, such as the Master System (which I owned and loved) but unfortunately that system really does not change things considerably, in fact it does not change the growth that occurred in the PS/N64 era at all. It only effects the growth from the NES to the SNES/MD era. The biggest error however, for the record, is that the "generations" are not clear cut and have significant cross-over.
Furthermore you bring up competitors and substitutes for the NES. Good point. Turns out you're opening a can of worms if you want to go there though. Countries have hundreds of pages of legislation that helps people to determine what constitutes a market and even with all that it is never clear cut. For example both movies, DVDs and books are imperfect substitutes for videogames in an economic analysis. A legal argument could be made that they are all the one market. So yes, I did ignore "gaming computers" and "arcades" but if I wanted to go there I should also consider box office takings and VHS earnings and that seemed overly complicated for a quick forum analysis. Now you may thing that doing that is going way over the top but as an Economist that would naturally be how I would go about a proper analysis of the market. I decided to stick with relevant near perfect substitutes, which meant I only considered consoles within a given generation, which is a perfectly reasonable way to go about things given the circumstances.
However it seems that you will not be happy with any argument that suggests that the PS significantly expanded the videogames market. Given that you are unwilling to provide any data to back up your ideas - well you did provide some data initially but you chose to ignore all competitors to the NES and PS despite coming back later and suggesting they were not only highly relevant to the analysis but that the competitors needed to expand well beyond the console market to look at things accurately, it appears that you contradicted yourself - it seems clear that I would be wasting my time to continue this discussion.
At the end of the day, the PS outsold all prior consoles by a significant amount despite facing stronger direct competition, which indicates that it managed to find previously untapped demographics. It really shouldn't be any more complicated than that.
