RubberWhistleHistle said:
the first console i bought with my own money was.. the wii u. but its really not about what i bought with my own money. its about what i have experienced over the course of my life.
Oh, but it is about what you buy with your own money. Having to foot the bill yourself for all of your entertainment fundamentally changes the way you perceive and appreciate it. As a kid, I took it for granted that my parents would provide my games for me (I had no older siblings, either). The last system they ever bought for me was the SNES in 1993. By time I was in high school, on birthdays & Christmases I only got things I needed, not things I wanted. When I got my first job, I had more freedom to buy what I wanted when I wanted, but I was still constrained by how much I brought in. Necessities still came first, and when a video game was half a week's pay (it took longer to earn the money to buy a game back then, as sticker prices have remained flat while the minimum wage was much lower in 1998), you understand what it takes to really earn your luxuries instead of passively enjoying them because someone else is paying.
i have been an owner of all seventh gen consoles from the start. sixth gen, the gc and ps2 tore it up pretty quickly. 64 had an abnormally low amount of games, but there were other factors that contributed to that. ps1 got the ball rolling pretty quick. snes, genesis had games coming out the ass immediately as well. i really dont see how whats going on right now is the same as what happened with older consoles.
If the Wii U was the first system you owned, then you were gifted anything before that. You may "own" it, but you didn't earn it. In any case, you overestimate previous generations' first years. Let's take the 16-bit era as an example. According to Wikipedia, the SNES had 66 games in its first year in America, but it's worth pointing out that many of those had already been out in Japan for a while. The SNES wasn't released in America until nine months until after it came out in Japan, so the SNES already built up a library Same for the Genesis, which took 8-½ months to come out in America after its Japanese release. Thanks to Nintendo's de fact monopoly on third-party games in the 80s, the Genesis only had some 29 games released by the end of 1989, including Japan-only releases. That changed in 1990 when another 57 games were released. And keep in mind that in the 16-bit era a team of 15-20 guys could churn out a game in a few months on a budget of less than $250k. The PS4 and XBO will by the end of this year each have about 55-60 games available at retail. Of course, you arbitrarily dismiss most of those as mere shovelware, but how many early SNES and Genesis games were really, truly top-flight games worth buying. If you say that's subjective, then so too must the dimissal of the majority of the PS4 & XBO lineup be done based on subjective criteria. In any case, with games having longer production cycles, bigger teams, and bigger budgets, I'd say 60 games at retail in the first 13+ months is pretty damn good. It might've been 70+ games had so many not been pushed back to next year.
also, for your information, i have probably like 6000 video games in my closet. i know a shit ton about the history of all the major consoles and, really, since the super nintendo started, ive played all of them as they were released. (i had older brothers 6 and 10 years older than me so i was fortunate enough to start out with actraiser for snes as my very first video game.)
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