N64 & Cube are abominations

[Mr Khan]

MontanaHatchet said:

amp316 said:
If the N64 was an abomination, then I must be one of Satan's spawn as much as I've enjoyed playing the games on that thing.

The reason that it failed was because it used an outdated format (cartridges), and Sony did an excellent job of marketing itself as the "cooler" system to the beer drinking jocks of the world.

There are some points I agree and disagree with in this post.

The N64 was certainly a great system with some obviously fantastic games, so it's hardly an abomination. And having cartridges definitely did not contribute to its success. 

However, a huge aspect of the Playstation's success wasn't just in appealing to jocks. If you look at the hardware totals, the PS1 and NES are basically on par in terms of hardware sales in NA and Japan. The vast majority of the growth came from Europe and the developing markets. The most important thing that Sony did in terms of growing the gaming market was making millions of gamers in the PAL region enter the home console market through games that appealed to the market (e.g. Gran Turismo).

But is this a meaningful market expansion, or merely geographic, taking advantage of the fact that Sony had better distribution networks being an all-purpose electronics giant than Nintendo or Sega might have had?

This isn't to say that Sony doesn't deserve credit for bringing Europe better into play, but it does suggest that PlayStation's appeal to the consumer in history is now viewed as more significant than it actually was, vis-a-vis the gaming market as a non-geographic entity.