| DonFerrari said: There is no way to tell what would happen if Nintendo hadn't entered the fray in the 80's but what we can be sure is that it would have taken longer, if there would be a bigger crash or if things would be better in the end we can't be sure... but in the case of Sony, seeing how many failed and that no one else tried before MS entered and also didn't really suceed at first I don't think anyone else would make the same success. |
You're making assumptions on what could have happened using what did happen as your only basis. You can't do that. Remove Sony from the equation, since that is the entire basis of the op. Put another CD-based platform on the market now since not only Nintendo would have developed one eventually, but Sega already had one. Now, remove the $299 PlayStation completely from your thinking which is what caused Sega to make so many missteps with their Saturn launch. Someone is going to benefit from all of that 3rd Party software I mentioned. Someone earlier in this thread claimed that franchises like Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, and Metal Gear Solid wouldn't have existed without the PlayStation, but it's completely the other way around. The PlayStation succeeded in large part, because they were the default beneficiary of all that 3rd Party support. Remove the PlayStation from the playing field as the op suggests, and what happens to those games/franchises? Do they just disappear into thin air? No. They appear on whatever else would have been the dominant console of the 5th generation. Why? Because they weren't developed by Sony in the first place! Zorg1000 clearly showed in his posts that the video game userbase was not decreasing gen over gen before Sony arrived. It was increasing. Just because the op only cares to show how Nintendo was losing market share gen over gen, doesn't mean the home console market as a whole was shrinking. That's selective thinking. You have to look at the industry as a whole. And to pretend that Square, Konami, etc. would not have released their flagship titles somewhere else just because the PlayStation didn't exist is even more representative of selective thinking.
As for others tried and failed, you are still narrow-mindedly thinking it terms of only what happened, instead of what could have happened. TurboGraphx-16 was doomed by no 3rd Party support. Atari Jaguar was also doomed by lack of 3rd Party support (and difficult to develop for which didn't help). SNK released NeoGeo gold at $649, which is the equivalent of over $1,000 today. Even the silver version at $399 was too expensive for it's day when SNES and Genesis were both under $200. Panasonic put a $700 3DO on the market, so also no surprise that it failed. That would be the equivalent of releasing a $1,143 console today. Yeah, that's not going to succeed in any generation. Look how much marketshare Sony lost from their PS2 when they tried releasing a $600 PS3 onto the market (that's the gen that Sony lost me as a consumer for example). Barring the consoles that priced themselves out of the market from consideration, now add the 3rd party support Sony enjoyed to one of the other consoles. Somebody was going to benefit from those titles as I previously mentioned. Either Sega Saturn would have done a great deal better. Atari could have enjoyed a resurgence since 3rd party's were on the fence about producing titles for Jaguar, preferring to wait and see if it would build up a strong userbase (which is coincidentally the exact same pitfall the Wii U fell into this gen for comparison). Subtract the PlayStation from the market and maybe the Jaguar's userbase grows at a sufficient pace to entice 3rd partys to jump on board.
Am I saying Jaguar, Saturn, or another unreleased console would have sold 100 million units? Not per se. Because that's not what the op asked. He asked if the absence of the PlayStation would have led the industry to another crisis. I'm saying it wouldn't for the reasons I laid out. The industry was already increasing gen over gen as has been illustrated elsewhere in this thread. And, somebody else would have benefitted from all that 3rd party support that the PlayStation enjoyed. You are pretending that there is NO scenario where the console market could have thrived without the existence of the Sony PlayStation. There are always other scenarios. It's like saying the way World War II played out is the ONLY way World War II could have possibly ended. That would be ridiculously ignorant and pig-headed. Hitler could have made other decisions that would have drastically altered the course of the war. Germany could have attacked Great Britain when they had the chance. Historians have long since admitted that Britain's costline was woefully under-defended at the time. They also acknowledge that the Luftwaffe's switch from strategic bombing to terror bombing also was a blunder on Hitler's part. Germany could have not attacked the Soviet Union opening themselves up to a 2-front war when they did. There's a reason there are so many "What if?" novels exist out there. Just because something did happen, doesn't make it the only way it EVER could have happened. Yours, the op, and others here are claiming that only Sony could have kept the video game industry expanding (when it was clearly expanding before their entry into the marketplace); and that's just not the case.
