What would have happened in the PS1 vs. N64 thread if...

[bdbdbd]

If OOT would have come out earlier, before FF7, maybe N64 could have eventually reached 40M sold, but i don't think it would have had effect on PSX sales. It would have got few 3rd party games more but that's just about it. I don't think that time there were "many" N64 or Saturn owners that didn't have PSX, since it was the only one that had 3rd party support and without games drought.

Soleron said:

 

What happened between SNES and N64 that caused third parties to turn away? Why was Sony, a newcomer, accepted so readily in Nintendo's place?

Basically nothing happened between SNES and N64, but there were various reasons for Sony having success, such as: -Cost of developing/publishing, as in hard to master hardware, opposed to easy PSX, expensive cartriges (around 5$ a piece), opposed to cheap CD (around 0,10$ a piece). -Nintendos quality standards, they wanted only the top devs to develope for N64 to prevent all shovelware, opposed to lack of standards on PSX. -The 64MB cartriges weren't big enough for the new trend games, which usually had quite much of videos, which take space, opposed to 600MB CD:s (although, N64 supported high data compression). -Marketing, Sony really pushed PSX marketing. At that time, Playstation ads were literally everywhere, movies, bus stops, TV... -Late release opposed to early PSX release, which helped Sony to gain enough gap to gain momentum that N64 couldn't pass. At the start, Sony didn't need to compete anyone but Sega, which just had fucked up its fans and quite a few publishers. -Cost of games at retail, the high cost for publishing, caused N64 to be 20-30% more expensive at retail than the PSX games. -"hardcore" vs "casual", when N64 was targeted solely for the "hardcore", PSX got the "casual" audience.