Why Sonys Play Station is the standard for home consoles since 1994 ?

[Pyro as Bill]

Soundwave said:

OTBWY said:

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. 

The cassette Walkman was old news but the CD version was still colloquially referred to as the 'CD Walkman' even if it was made by Phillips/Panasonic.  Things might have been different in the US and Europe but here Sony making a console gave the 70s kids/young adults permission to play games again and that was helped by the type of software PS1 offered. Parents also trusted Sony and saw the value in a device that could play music and games as opposed to a standalone games machine. I've known parents ban kids from videogames but never music.