Nintendo banned Square from their offices for 10 years after FFVII went to PlayStation. EDIT: japanese business model is akin to Yakuza

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Ka-pi96 said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

You must be really young if you don't remember that there were far more console makers before Ninty conquered a near monopolistic market domination for almost ten years, interrupted just by the first Playstation. Sure, Ninty rose on the ashes of competitors burned by a big crisis, but from then on it actively prevented most of them to rise again and new competitors to rise for years, only Sega could barely compete for long period. Sure Sony just interrupted the monopoly, but it did nothing to increase plurality, MS could enter the market just by the brute force of its money and the force of its brand in PC market, while the new trimurti of console gaming merrily crushed poor Sega, the only survivor left, besides Ninty itself, of console golden age.
BTW, I'm not a Sony gamer, I'm a PC and Android one, the last console I owned was the Intellivision. I was on the brink of buying a PSV, because I tried it and it was the first portable of which I ever felt really comfortable with the form factor and control layout, but its commercial decline and the rise of cheap tablets made me change my mind. OTOH both my sister and some of my ex-gf's had a GameBoy, but I never liked it enough to buy one. Tried DS, I liked it more than GB, but still not enough, then 3DS came and I really didn't like its 3D screen. PSP, I liked some games, but unlike PSV, and despite having a control layout just a little different, it gave me hand cramps after playing for a while, so I didn't buy it either.

And you must be really old if you think anything pre-Sony was the "console golden age". No offence intended, but...come on! PS1/N64 was when console gaming became great!

Also, at the idea Sony "stole" the market from Nintendo. Somebody's bias is showing...

It was a golden age as a still vastly unexplored world, full of opportunities, with many console companies naïvely thinking they could have thrived.
Some consoles, like Intellivision and ColecoVision, had better HW, particularly their standard controllers, than competitors, but their managements weren't good enough and they eventually lost the war, while, Atari, the first leader, fell badly from its throne.
I tend to prefer games from '97 to around 2005, and some newer ones too, and I expect even better things in the future, I can see and I appreciate progress in game development (most of all I appreciated when the switch to 32bit and even better 64bit allowed to have really vast and detailed gaming worlds), but golden age isn't necessarily the best of all time, it's more an age when there were still fewer, and less refined, actual things than future opportunities, but everything looked possible, sooner or later.
That early simple gaming style isn't my favourite anymore, but I sometimes still miss it a bit.
BTW the Mario franchise, probably still the most successful ever, was born in that golden age, but Ninty was the first to lose part of that early innocence and turn it into a rarely failing and lethally focused gaming business instinct.
As for Sony and Ninty, I like what they do and I like and acknowledge their contribution to gaming, but I can also see how their overwhelming domination eventually crushed the remaining competition, and MS can be the right thing for many gamers (still far fewer than those that play on PC and just happen to use a MS OS because it's the most widespread there), but it isn't a proper replacement for what got lost in the console world.