Without Playstation, would the industry be in another crisis?

[Johnw1104]

I guess my issue with this is the assumption that there'd be entire demographics of unhappy people without a console to play if Sony wasn't present... If anyone abhors a vacuum more than nature its your average corporation, and someone would certainly have filled whatever void Sony left as time went on.

I do agree that it's sad to look at that list of games (many of which would have existed without Sony mind you) we'd never have received, but it's possible we'd have an entirely different list with someone else. Sony's "innovations" extend mostly to marketing to non-gamers via focusing on the DVD player and being very hands off with 3rd party developers (granted Sega did this, but Sega was too busy releasing their 32x for a half year run to recall that they likely ought to advertise their Saturn).

Mind you I've always loved my Playstations and fear I'm coming across too harshly, but I don't see any out-there innovations from them that someone else wouldn't have eventually done. Really, they succeeded by just not doing anything stupid... If nintendo had gone optical drive with the N64 Sony's run may have been a short one, but they entered at a time when both Nintendo and Sega had their respective heads up their asses.