Without Playstation, would the industry be in another crisis?

[zorg1000]

naruball said:

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.

Many people stop playing games after a certain age? Do u have any sort of data to back that up? Like somebody says, "hey its my 22nd birthday, I guess it's time to give up gaming and become an adult!!!"

No, that's not how it works, if gaming is something u really enjoy and is ur hobby, u don't just give it up because u hit some unspecified age. Now do some people quit gaming because they have more responsibilities like work or family and no longer have time or money to continue gaming as a hobby? Yes that's completely reasonable to expect.

Sega's strategy was working very well in the early 90s, that has nothing to do with their downfall. The downfall came because they pissed off fans by releasing expensive, add-ons for Genesis that got very little support and by high launch price of Saturn. They also angered retailers who were left out of the early launch of Saturn. They also angered developers by making a difficult to program for console and doing the surprise early launch because these developers weren't able to capitalize on launch sales. These things made gamers, retailers and developers choose Playstation over Saturn and Sega started losing a ton of money by cutting the price of Saturn and selling it at a big loss.

Many of these things wouldn't have happened if Playstation never existed. When Sony revealed the Playstation specs in early 1994, Sega panicked and doubled the components to Saturn which made it more complex to program for and making it more expensive. The early surprise launch was also an attempt to give them a head start against Playstation. So if Playstation hadn't released, Saturn would have been easier to develop for, cheaper and wouldn't have a rushed early launch meaning they wouldn't have angered fans, retailers and developers nearly as much as they did.