What if.... Sega never made that awful mistake with the Sega Saturn?

[MikeRox]

Shadow1980 said:

Second, the Saturn was supposedly difficult to develop for, which probably would have resulted in most third parties sticking with PS1. Square, Enix, Capcom, and Konami, the biggest third parties of the late 80s & early 90s, jumped ship from Nintendo to Sony because the PS1 used CDs. The Saturn was CD-based as well, but I doubt those third parties would have made a concerted effort to port all their biggest games to the Saturn, and besides, this was a time when exclusives were the rule rather than the exception, which may have been due to greater hardware differences between platforms (it wasn't until the sixth generation when platforms started to become more congruent in capabilities, a process that resulted in the PS4 and XBO both using the same x86 processor).

Actually, Sony had very little support initially. Everybody thought the PS1 would be a spectacular failure like the 3DO and expected Sega and Nintendo to continue to rule supreme. And exclusives weren't very common at all. Games came out on everything under the sun in the mid 90s.

Sony had to put an awful lot of work into convincing the likes of Square and Namco to support them. This went as far as actually doing all their Western publishing and distribution for them and also down to funding marketing for the software.

Final Fantasy VII was a Sega Saturn exclusive before Sony talked them into going with the PS1. There is a reason FFVII was the first (main franchise) Final Fantasy game to be released in Europe, and that was because Sony published and distributed it for them. Something Nintendo had never thought to do previously.

Namco were lured again with Sony doing all the publishing and footing a lot of the risk for them, particularly in the West where they had limited presence as far as home consoles went. They also got led on the fact that on PlayStation, they had no competition, whilst on the Saturn, their flagship arcade titles would be going up against the kings of the day. Tekken would have had to go toe to toe with Virtua Fighter on Saturn, Ridge Racer would also have had Daytona USA. Direct competition which they sidestepped by taking Sony up on their offer.

Sony worked hard to get the 3rd party support they got and in 1994 they were unable to take any developer for granted. Even the games the PS1 is best known for like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were multiplatform franchises initially. This combined with their ground breaking decision to sell hardware at a loss to recoup back on software gave them a rocket start which is why it ended up becoming the defacto system. Also it's no coincidence that they were the first console manufacturer to not treat Europe like a bastard child and the fact they were the first manufacturer to truly crack Europe which had been far more Home Computer centric up until that point.

It was all this combined with SEGA's (and to a lesser extent Nintendo's) mis-steps that put PlayStation where it was. Timing was crucial, had they not hit the market at the time they did as well as having all this in place, PlayStation would have probably ended up on the pile with the CDi, 3DO, AmigaCD32, Atari Jaguar etc. Nintendo's delay and Sega's "overpriced underpowered" rival option gave the perfect storm a new unknown entity needed in the gaming place. Sony didn't have the brute force finances Microsoft were able to use to gain a foothold. Most of Sony actually thought the PlayStation was a joke until it unexpectedly prevailed.