S.T.A.G.E. said:
Soundwave said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:
walsufnir said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:
Yep...exactly the reason all the toy stores went out of business where I live. Babies, toddlers and very young children are the only reason Toys R Us still exists. K B Toys went ouf business where I live because of EB Games. Electronics took over and kids are kicking over toys just to get their hands on games. They are desensitized to the effects of technology. Then the Playstation came onto th scene the game industry grew by like forty million+ and continued to grow there after and then MS segmented that crowd. Thats an effect if I ever saw one. Today the average gamer is an adult.
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The question is if this happened because of Playstation alone which I highly doubt. Sony changed the competition but in no way did they change the word "toys". Arcade games back then also were not considered as toys.
Btw, I think it's not a good thing that kids will get their hands on consoles instead of playing with "real" toys.
Edit: Yes, the average gamer is now an adult. They started playing before PSX and are still doing it.
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The gaming industry increased in size because the Playstation turned the videogame console into the center of the livingroom thus giving you a reason not to buy multiple pieces of media when you had the "all in one box".
IE: My PSX was my cousins gaming console and music center because he had his surround sound connected to his TV and big screen TV.
IE: The PS2 made DVD players affordable and Microsoft followed suit with the Xbox. Their sales combined was nearly 180 million excluding Nintendo with DVD players inside, mind you.
This prompts adults to take gaming seriously since they are invested in their living room.
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Personally I don't buy it. I was the Playstation target audience when it was launching, I was basically entering my teens.
Everyone I knew eventually basically got a Playstation, but all of them had a NES 7-8 years prior. Then you also had younger 8-12 year olds getting their first console that gen and that was a Playstation.
The Wii really is the only console I've ever seen that's legimiately brought in total non-gamers (as in adults) en masse.
You had 80 million SNES/Genesis owners that needed to upgrade to something, almost all bought a Playstation because it had all the third party support. Some bought an N64, but even most N64 owners caved and bought a PSX eventually.
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CD's and CD players were affordable when the PSX came out but the market expanded because of the PSX capabilities. Target audience was expanded by the PS2 because no one could afford DVD players and laser disc format died off.
The Wii...brought the most non-gamers, but the Playstation brought a large stable mass of an audience to gaming and kept their hunger for multimedia sated whilst keeping the videogames at the forefront.
Between the SNES and genesis there were above one hundred million users. The PSX sold above that by itself, thus proving the market expanded the gen after on his first go-round. It did something Panasonic failed to do earlier with the 3DO.
The third party support is a major part of the equation for many consoles, but Nintendos consoles were still considered toys and still aren't taken seriously to this day outside of the core gamers.
The N64 had some expensive games, by default it caused people to step away. Some of the launch gamers were super expensive. Nintendo didn't make it easy for people.
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Well you have 80 million SNES/Genesis owners, and you have 20-30 million new kids coming of "gaming age" each generation naturally too.
I just think the notion that gaming was some happy, candyland toy business before Sony showed up and showed everyone the way is one of the biggest myths in game history revisionism.
SEGA really deserves credit for marketing towards older audiences. In fact, a lot of Sony's intial marketing for the Playstation was similar in style to what Sega had been doing for years prior very successfully which was basically marketing to the MTV audience.
People have to understand that in the early 1990s popular culture was going through seismic shifts with the boom of grunge music from Seattle and gangster rap. The move to darker, violent-obsessed themes was in full swing from the more happy-go-lucky late 1980s. Mortal Kombat and DOOM already laid the ground work for the modern "dude bros" games, and the GENESIS (not Playstation) was the console that popularized the Madden NFL, FIFA, NHL, NBA Live, and other sport sim franchises effectively creating the "jock" market.
All this stuff was already in place before the Playstation arrived, Sony just took advantage of Nintendo and Sega's stupid mistakes in transitioning to the 32-bit/64-bit generation and landed almost the entire pie to themselves. Even if you had an N64, you almost certainly had to buy a PSX to fill out your gaming diet. Sure they played a role in furthering video games (so did the Wii, so did XBox) popularity, but the game business by the mid-90s was going to grow no matter what, the kids who had an NES at age 8-9, were not going to quit playing at age 18 anymore, the complexity of gaming had become such that we had gone past that "hook point".
