Without Playstation, would the industry be in another crisis?

[naruball]

zorg1000 said:

naruball said:

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.

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.

Not necessarily. Many people stop gaming after a certain age. Who knows how many more would have stopped (because it was no longer cool to do so), had ps not expanded the market. Also, how was sega's strategy working? Obviously it didn't work enough, hence their failure. But even if they had done alright (with ps out of the picture), they never had the money for the promotion that Sony has been doing since forever. Sega would never be able to afford that. They couldn't promote their brand the way, for example, Sony did with football games etc.

Considerably less though. And that's what's important here.