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Mandalore76 on 12 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.

Video Game Consoles sold by Gen in millions:
2nd Gen - 38.5m (Atari 2600 30m, Intellivision 3m, Odyssey2 2m, ColecoVision 2m, Atari 5200 1m, Fairchild Channel F .25m
3rd Gen -  84.01m (NES 61.91m, Sega Master System 17.8m, Atari 7800 4.3m)
4th Gen -  100.78m (SNES 49.1m, Sega Genesis 39.7m, Turbo Grafx 16/PC Engine 10m, Phillips CD-I 1m, Neo Geo .98m)
5th Gen -  147.51m (PS1 102.49, N64 32.93m, Sega Saturn 9.26m, 3DO 2m, Atari Jaguar .25m, Amiga CD32 .10m, PC-FX .40m, FM Towns Marty .045m, Apple Bandai Pippin .042m)

A couple of things flat out wrong with what you said.  First of all, Sony didn't expand the video game market in a way hitherto previously unseen.  3rd Generation Console Sales saw a 54% increase over the 2nd Gen when the NES entered the market.  The increase of 5th Generation Console Sales over 4th Generation was only 32%.  So no, while Sony sucked up more market share in the 5th Gen thanks to Nintendo and Sega both stumbling simultaneously rather than one or the other, the PlayStation's arrival did not expand the market more dramatically than when the NES entered the scene 2 gens previously.  To further prove this, the NES as a market leader had 51% higher sales than the previous gen's market leader, the 2600.  The original PlayStation as market leader saw 52% higher sales than the previous gen's market leader, the SNES.  That's only a 1% higher increase, so again, not the massively never seen before increase you describe.

*By the way, the Sega Genesis is notoriously under-tracked.  But, even if you use the smaller # of 33.75m sales, the increase of 5th Gen over 6th Gen sales would still be only 36%.  So, still far less than the 54% increase from 3rd Gen over 2nd Gen when NES entered the market.  Here is my source for the more likely Genesis total:

This brings the total sold worldwide to around 39.7 million.

http://segatastic.blogspot.com/2009/12/mega-drive-sales-figures-update.html

2nd, your claim that Sony increased the video game market in such a dramatic fashion that even the 3rd best selling console was able to sell almost 10 million units is a complete fallacy.  In the 4th Gen, prior to Sony's entrance to the market, the Turbo Grafx 16/PC Engine sold 10 million units, coming in 3rd in sales for that gen.  That's more than the Sega Saturn sold in the 5th Gen.  So in actuality, the 3rd Place console performed better prior to Sony's entrance in the marketplace.  Not, Sony making video gaming so mainstream that the 3rd place console seller performed better than any other time in previous history as you claim.