What matters next gen (Power or innovation?)

[dunno001]

disolitude said:

dunno001 said:

Of these, neither. What matters is games. If a system doesn't have the games, it dies.

But if I had to pick between these 2 only, easily innovation; it's more influencial than power over every gen. Observe:

Pong won, despite being the simplest game known to exist. It innovated by creating gaming.

Atari 2600 won, for introducing arcade games at home and interchangable cartridges, despite both its main competitors (Colecovision and Intellivision) being stronger.

NES won, for bringing about quality control, and completely redoing the controller. A stronger Master System could not topple it.

SNES won, for continuing to innovate the controller. Admittingly, it also got to ride on the Nintendo brand, however, the arcade power in the Neo-Geo could not overtake it.

PS1 won, for making the CD standard from day 1, though, while also on the earlier Saturn, the power also brought about the FMV (and in my eyes, the fall of gaming, but that's for another thread) propelling it past the superior in power N64.

PS2 won, though it was the weakest system this gen. I can't point to any significant innovation at all though.

Well... it's the current generation... I think the verdict will be obvious here...

I think Snes wan cause nintendo made amazing games for it. Especially towards the end of that gen. Had Sega stuck to their gaming guns as well and not screwed around with Sega CD/32X they would have given snes more than it could handle. They had Europe and US in the bag till 1994...then they got spread too thin on too many systems.

There were standard CD based systems before PS1. PS1 won because Sony started using hype for hardware and gave everyone a lesson in game marketting. They started the whole "lose money on hardware-make money on software" model and were very aggressive in courting 3rd parties for exclusivity.  Sega didn't help its cause by having absolutely no management direction outside of japan and nintendo screwed the pooch for using cartriges.

PS2 won with the exact same model as PS1 as well as continued success of PS1. Huge tech hype out of the gate, rally 3rd party support...by the time Xbox and gamecube came which were more powerful, Ps2 was already a generation winner.

P1: I won't dispute the SNES games, though I was trying to stay in context of the power vs innovation aspect. Games trump both of those, so having innovation AND the games makes one an easy winner. As for Sega, yes, they did have Europe sewn up, but it was a lot closer in the US. Where it was that Sega lost was when Nintendo showed that you don't need hardware upgrades to do things like Donkey Kong Country. I still think that game would have made Sega lose either way, but it wouldn't have been as bad of a bloodbath late in.

P2: From day 1? Other than the Saturn, what disk-based system came first? Sega CD was an add-on to the Genesis, and the TurboDuo was an evolution of the TG16 and its HuCards. I recall there being other disk-based add-ons for many other systems, but I can't think of any others from day 1. Marketing was not a new thing, though I will grant Sony did step it up a fair bit. The selling at a loss is an interesting one also; though I'm not too sure how that would lead to them winning...

P3: Again, it's coming to the games. Sony didn't innovate anything new there, though, since neither MS nor Nintendo did either, their lead on games did lead to them winning.