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fatslob-:O said:
Mnementh said:

Sorry, yes, I mixed up the numbers. My main point stays: that the numbers alone don't say anything about significance.

The first movers are usually a tiny blip compared to the market if properly covered. The first movers have to test out things, establish for customers that the possibility for this type of product even exists and so on. That is why first movers usually don't seem to be big in hindsight. But the 350K sales for Odyssey were more than enough to prove that a market for home gaming systems is sustainable. That was the important part.

And Atari on the other hand - it came into the market together with a lot of other contenders. Not only fairchild. 1975 and 1976 saw a lot of new contenders. Without Atari one of them would've been market leader. To be precise: the first Atari-system (Home Pong) sold only 150K and was outsold for instance by Colecos Telstar. 1975 also Magnavox discontinued the original Odyssey- but for a series of Odyssey machines (Odyssey 100, Odyssey 200 and so on). Ataris sales champion 2600 was really late, it started in 1977. So it is easy to see, that Atari could've been replaced easily. Also the game that pushed Atari a lot was Pac-Man, a licensed game. Someone would've probably done that. I would assume without Atari Coleco and Magnavox would've fought for market leader, but that is speculation.

But while Atari could've been easily replaced, without Ralph Baer and the Brown Box (that became the Odyssey) the market would've been created at that point. Atari, Coleco, Mattel, Fairchild - they all tried this because the Odyssey showed this is possible. Without it it would've taken years and at that point would've been met with serious competition of PC-gaming. Console gaming would look very different.

You need more than just pioneers to be able to show that there is a market for similar products. 350K is hardly what anyone would call sustainable in terms of commercial viability now and even back then ... 

There's tons of examples out there where new standards or products that were pioneered fail to get traction ... (3D displays, Segway, camera controller's like Eyetoy or Kinect, wearables and etc) 

Most of the other contenders were hardly prepared at the time and if Atari didn't exist then the console gaming industry would've been delayed by half a decade or more depending on the circumstances so Atari is hardly what you'd describe as being replaceable ... 

Mainstreaming your solution is just as important as pioneering it and from that perspective the Atari 2600 was just as impactful as the Magnavox Odyssey if not then even more so ...

OK, I think we must agree to disagree.



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