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DreadPirateRoberts on 10 November 2018
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thismeintiel said:
Mandalore76 said:

Did it really though?  Video gaming was expanding Gen over Gen before Sony's entrance into the market.  Whenever a competitor stumbles, someone always fills more of the void than if there was a healthy environment.  When Atari, Coleco, and Mattel all got hit by the North American Video Game Crash, Nintendo stepped in and absorbed all of their sales, plus whatever part of the market they might have had anyway.  Once Sega got a foothold in the marketplace, the SNES had to split sales with the Genesis that the NES hadn't had to face the previous gen.  But the SNES having less sales than the NES doesn't mean the video game market contracted.  It expanded.  When Nintendo stumbled by sticking to cartridges with the N64, and Sega made their mistakes leading to the Saturn launch, Sony sucked in sales from 2 competitors simultaneously.  It's easy to look at the PlayStation's sales in a vacuum and say "Sony introduced 100 million people to video games that weren't there before", but that's a gross over-estimation of what happened.  Each successive gen has a wider consumer pool of potential sales to go after.  If Nintendo had switched to discs, they wouldn't have lost Square and the Final Fantasy series, among other 3rd party support, and the N64 would have taken back some of the sales it lost to the PlayStation.  If Sega hadn't made the mistakes they made as well, the division of console sales would have been more even among the 3, more like what we saw in the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 gen just recently.

edit - I also don't think the PlayStation library is dramatically more impressive than the NES library.  Not by a wide margin, or any margin to be honest.

Of course it grew the market.  Much more than when it was basically just Nintendo and Sega in the mix.  During the NES era, the two top consoles sold ~75M consoles combined, with the top console selling ~62M.  The following gen, ~80M total, with the top console selling just ~49M.  A growth of just 5M units, hardly anything to tout. 

The PS1 pushed gaming into the mainstream.  It wasn't just a relatively niche hobby, it was a cool activity for all.  It became the first console to sell 100M+ units, minus the Gameboy, which had little competition and was allowed to stay on the market for 12 years before the GBA launched.  The total for the top two consoles jumped from ~80M to 135M, a huge growth of 55M units.  It even grew to the point where the 3rd place could sell almost 10M, a first.  PS expanded the market even more so during the PS2 era, where the top two consoles sold a combined 182M, another huge growth of 48M.  And 3rd place actually sold 20M+.

So, yea, Sony and the PS deserve a lot of credit for making the industry the size it is today.

I can only half agree.  Sony and the PS1 certainly helped fuel a continued growth of the market - and as already noted, cashed in heavily on the collapse of PC gaming in Europe.  The PS1 (and then PS2) were definitely critical releases that helped the market move forward. Where I disagree is the claim that the PS1 made gaming mainstream.  In North America, the credit for that goes to Atari, and then to Nintendo for rescuing the industry from the ashes of Atari's flame-out.  The PS1 was just a continuation of growth.  Likewise in Japan, gaming had been mainstream for years and had taken no notice of the crash that decimated the North American market.

 

Also, lol at "it was the first to sell 100 million if you ignore the device that beat it to 100 million."