I'd say that manufacturer success/failure depends more on what they do moreso than what the competition does. Look at Ninty, they just do their own thing and are still around. Sega just screwed up with the DC but if they were a bigger company, they'd still be in the manufacturing business. Releasing so many consoles back to back was like giving 3rd parties a middle finger especially the way they dropped support for their old systems. This just created distrust from both gamers and developers alike and eventually led to their demise.
A smaller company would have gone bankrupt in the early years of the ps3. I got the thing 5 months after launch and spent more time playing the likes of FFXII, Persona 4 and other ps2 games mosreso than ps3 games for the 1st year or 2 after I got the console.
"Dr. Tenma, according to you, lives are equal. That's why I live today. But you must have realised it by now...the only thing people are equal in is death"---Johann Liebert (MONSTER)
"WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives"---Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler
