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Soundwave on 08 June 2020
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OTBWY said:
Soundwave said:

For all the talk about "Sony" brand meaning so much in the 90s, there sure wasn't much evidence of that early on.

The Saturn was outselling the Playstation quite easily in Japan for example.

The N64 was destroying the Playstation's sales pace in North America and also had a way stronger launch in Japan.

Money-hatting IPs like Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider is when the Playstation started to accelerate in sales, not their brand.

They would have gotten beat by the N64 plain and simple if Nintendo had compromised with their close partners like Squaresoft and Capcom and used CD-ROM. You could still have had cartridge based games too if that's what Miyamoto wanted. They would not have been able to compete against Nintendo's 1st party IP of the day like Mario 64, GoldenEye, Zelda: OoT, Mario Kart 64, etc. on top of things like Nintendo having exclusive Star Wars games and 3rd party titles like Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil 2/3 (day and date), Dino Crisis, Chrono Cross, etc. 

I think people underestimate the huge power Sony had as a company back then. They were "the" electronics company. Always setting out for market standards when it came to formats and other media. Some failed hard like Betamax, but then you have Trinitron or the Walkman. And with that power, they put a huge marketing budget behind it. First: moneyhatting Japanese developers (and in the west to some extent), using old fashioned Tokyo relations (as opposed to Nintendo's Kyoto relations) and driving that with massive marketing worth billions today and utilizing their extensive global distribution network. They were definitely not some kind of underdog. They were more like IBM coming into the personal computer market. 

I was there, I remember what it was. In fact I remember reading about the Playstation in 1991 when it was the SNES CD-drive. 

They basically aped the Super Nintendo and stole the 3rd party developers and locked them out from making Sega games. Once they got a few key ones on board the others followed suit. 

That was basically it. 

But early on? The Playstation was getting its ass kicked rather handily in several key markets. The N64 had way more hype and was selling way faster than the Playstation in the US and Japan. In Japan the Saturn was also outselling the Playstation. 

People were not that impressed with the brand "Sony", yeah they were a popular electronics brand but one of many, they were not anything like say Apple where the brand has a fanatical following. If you had a Panasonic stereo instead of a Sony one, no one cared and Beta was seen as a huge failure/laughing stock. 

The "Walkman" was old news by the mid-90s, dozens of different electronic companies had portable cassette players, it wasn't a big deal to specifically have the Sony branded one.