naruball said:
zorg1000 said:
What I mean by "we have established" is that him and I agree that the console market was likely to continue to grow with or without Playstation. Obviously we have clue what would have happened without Playstation, but there is nothing that suggests a "crisis" would happen since the American & Japanese console market was very healthy at the time. I'll give Playstation credit where credit is due, they made console gaming mainstream in Europe and developing countries, but they did not in America/Japan as gaming was already mainstream by then.
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It all comes down to how you define mainstream. Millions of people gaming on consoles does not necessarily mean it's mainstream. The way I see it, mainstream is when consoles stopped being seen as toys and were seen as somewhat cool even by non gamers or by young adults. That didn't happen, from my experience, until the playstation consoles were launched and expanded the market.
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Gaming was already heading that way before Playstation, Sega was marketing themselves as the cool brand in America and it was working, then u also had more mature, adult focused games coming in the early/mid 90s like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Night Trap. And u also have to consider kids who were gamers in the 80s were now becoming teens or young adults in the mid 90s so the gaming demographic was naturally going to become older.
And even to this day, gaming is still considered by many to be for kids, nerds and man-children. Playstation did not make gaming mainstream in America, did they help? Of course they did, but too many people act like gaming was niche before they arrived and that's simply not true.
