Industry to Nintendo, "We finally got you."

[Mr Khan]

imaprettyhotguy said:

Mr Khan said:

You're both right and wrong in one. A good head start can prove to be a gamechanger (see: PS2 vs Xbox and GC, 360 vs PS3), but it can also be surmounted (see: Wii vs 360, SNES vs Genesis). So long as your head start builds momentum behind itself, you can become inaccessible, or at least make it so that it takes competitors years to catch up (PS3 likely will catch 360 now, but it will have taken them 5 years to do it)

Out of the advantages 360 had over the ps3 at the start of the gen the headstart was one of the most minor ones, price point and lack of good launch games and exlcusive not to mention the lackluster 3rd party support (which should have been easy for them after the ps2 they were counting on it) so a headstart is a slight advantage but in the grand scheme its not that big of one and can easily be overcome 

No no, momentum is one of the most potent forces in this industry, and one of the hardest to fix or tamper with. Sony managed it simply because of the "multiplat everything" environment 3rd parties were trapped in, but early on you could see the tremendous damage that 360's lead had: people bought more 360 games because their friends had 360s and were playing online on their 360s, this lead to 360 being deemed the "default" console as far as 3rd party games went, and then Sony lost exclusivity to major titles (FFXIII and GTAIV) because of that effect. It was only because the whole "multiplat everything" blade cuts both ways that Sony isn't wallowing in utter market irrelevance right now: they get everything 360 gets, and so can compete on a level playing field

Getting a head-start can be bad (certainly didn't help the 3DO, Saturn, Dreamcast, or TurboGrafx16), but if you time it right, coming out first can be irreversible