How Sony became king of consoles again

[curl-6]

colafitte said:

curl-6 said:

The winner of a generation is and always has been the system that sells the most. In the case of the Wii though, many the self-described "hardcore" couldn't (and still can't) handle the idea of a "casual" Nintendo console beating a "hardcore" Playstation one, and thus manufactured a labyrinth of contrived narratives to try to argue that it somehow magically doesn't count.

Pyrrhus of Epirus won his battle against Rome back then too, but there's a reason why, more than 2000 years later we remember him more for the phrase "pyrrhic victory", which the meaning is "Someone who wins that takes a heavy toll that negates any true sense of achievement". Wii won many battles in their first years, yes, but the brand ultimately lost the war in the end, and Nintendo suffered for years because of that. 

Some people consider that a competition is not about how it begins, but how it ends, and those people will never consider the Wii a winner, no matter how much Wii sold against the PS3 or another console, so the "winner of the generation" is not and never was, just the system that sold the most. The only undisputable fact is that Wii sold the most, that's it. And because there's no official way to give the award of "winner" to one or another, what's only left is cultural perception and personal valoration, and I repeat, you can't trust on the first one. In my case, I don't think Wii consumers remember that console as fondly as PS3 consumers remember their own, but ey, it's just my opinion.

In the end it's simply a matter of denial. Some people still bear such a grudge against the Wii for daring to cater to people other than 13-30 year old males that they can never accept that it beat their preferred system. For as long as video games have competed against one another, outselling the competition has always denoted victory, and the only reason it is contested in this singular case is because of the irrational bias against the Wii, caused by impressionable folks buying into the "us vs them" rhetoric of the time and actually believing that laughable hogwash about how casual gaming was going to destroy the industry.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 05 October 2018