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Aquamarine on 19 April 2016
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potato_hamster said:
spemanig said:

Generations are arbitrary now? Saying that the Wii, DS, PS3, PSP, and 360 were part of the same generation is cherry picked now? Lmfao get out of here.

Generations were always arbitrary. If you don't believe me then I could justify that the Gameboy was part of either the NES, SNES or N64 generation depending on... well arbitrary reasons. I could also argue that consoles and handhelds aren't the same generations because... arbitrary reasons.

It's all arbitrary. Someone just randomly decided that X point in time was the start of one generation and Y point in time was the start of another, and everyone else went along with it. It's all meaningless.

Agreed. Tech advanced so quickly in the retail market that consoles would frequently come out all the time with only 1 year gaps between "generations."

 

The Atari 5200 came out in 1982 and it was considered "2nd gen."

But the Nintendo NES came out in 1983 and it was considered "3rd gen."

 

The Atari 7800 came out in 1986 and it was considered "3rd gen."

But the NEC TurboGrafx-16 came out in 1987 and it was considered "4th gen."

 

The Nintendo Game Boy Color came out in 1998 and it was considered "5th gen."

But the Sega Dreamcast came out in 1998 and it was considered "6th gen."

 

The Nokia N-Gage came out in 2003 and it was considered "6th gen."

But the Nintendo DS came out in 2004 and it was considered "7th gen."

 

Etc.

Everything just blurred together release-wise so it's really silly to look at generations in isolation without considering the broader market where many consoles peacefully co-existed.

In the retail market the Game Boy lasted from 1989 (when the NES was still king) to 2002 (when the GameCube was out). It was an incredibly unique phenomenon because it had virtually zero real competition anywhere.

Nintendo is completely different in 2016 than they were even back in 2002 when the OG Game Boy line finally died out, so people can't use Nintendo's former dominance as a crutch. What's relevant is the Nintendo of today...which is a non-entity to Sony.