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kopstudent89 on 12 November 2018
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twintail said:
Shadow1980 said:

I guess that statement was rather poorly phrased. My bad.

The point is, Sony's massive success wasn't entirely due to their own efforts. Yes, they did a lot of right things, and they could have made it competitive even without having the lion's share of third-party exclusives. It was only trailing the N64 by about 20% for the Jan.-Aug. period of 1997 in the U.S., which shows potential for filling in Sega's old spot as a close competitor to Nintendo even had they lacked big exclusive killer apps like Final Fantasy VII. But the competition wasn't even close for the generation as a whole. It was a total blowout in Sony's favor. And it was Nintendo's choice to go with carts that resulted in that generation being so lopsided. "Sony dominated because Nintendo screwed up" is a better summation of my original point.

 

I suppose if you believe this rather simplified and narrow-minded explanation of history, you are more than welcome to .

Obviously Nintendo's screw up was a factor that lead many 3rd party titles to jump to Sony's console, most notably FF7 which would have definitely made the N64 a lot more competitive particularly in Japan. 

It was more than that though. Nintendo wanted to protect their first party titles so their approach with 3rd parties was famously known to be harsh where as Sony were very open to all third parties and made sure they would succeed. Sony at the time obviously didn't make games so they made sure third parties were on board. 

You can also add the fact that Sony made cooler games that targetted an older market for the first time in such a scale. 

Really there's a whole lot of factors, like with everything, that usually sways the domination like that.