Without Playstation, would the industry be in another crisis?

[zorg1000]

naruball said:

zorg1000 said:

naruball said:

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.

Any data to back that up?

See how ridiculous that sounds? That's an observation, not something stated as a fact. Also, your example is weak as hell, unfortunately. Do you like everything you did when you were a child? Did you wake up one day and said, "I'm 13, no more hide and seek for me!!!". That's not how it works. People find different hobbies when they grow older. Obviously it doesn't happen with everyone, but it does happen with a lot of people, especially the ones that have an active social life and play sports in their spare time/need. Until a certain age, for many children games are all they talk about, but then it becomes all about girfriends/sex, cars, competitive sports, etc.

U do have a point, there was a 2-3 year gap in high school where I didn't play games as much because of wrestling and trying to get laid lol

But the point is this type of thing still happens, in huge numbers despite Playstation coming along and making gaming "cool". Like I already pointed out, gaming was heading in this direction in the years before Playstation's release simply due to people who grew up gaming in the 80s, now becoming young adults in the 90s.

That's why games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, etc were getting made, if the gaming population was basically just children would these types of games have gotten made? Probably not, and look at Goldeneye, it sold over 8 million and was played by a ton of teens & young adults without the help of Playstation.

I think people are getting things mixed up, it wasn't Playstation that made games for teens/adults successful, it was games for teens/adults that made Playstation successful. Considering fighting games like Street Fighter & Mortal Konbat were extremely popular on Nintendo/Sega, why wouldn't Tekken have been successful on them as well? 1st person shooters like Doom, Wolfenstein, Goldeneye, Turok were popular on non-Playstation hardware in the mid-90s, why wouldn't 3rd person shooters like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil or Metal Gear Solid be as well? Racing and sports games were very popular before Playstation as well, no reason to assume games like Ridge Racer or Gran Turismo wouldn't have found success on other platforms. Mario, Sonic and Donkey Kong were huge in the early 90s so I don't see why Crash or Spyro wouldn't have found success on Sega/Nintendo.

I will give Playstation credit for making Final Fantasy really big in America, since that series was around for nearly a decade on Nintendo hardware and never really took off in America.

That pretty much covers all the really big selling games on Playstation, they pretty much all belonged to genres that found a lot of success on hardware in the years leading up to Playstation's release.