Bofferbrauer2 said:
There's just one big problem with this premise: Gaming didn't need saving, as gaming was totally fine. The only thing that crashed was the US or north American console market, but gaming itself was not affected. People were gaming on their Computers over in Europe and America before and after the crash without any changes, Japanese on their consoles, and all of them in the Arcades, which were very popular even during the crash. If what you said was true, then there wouldn't be a Wikipedia page of videogames in 1984, since that's after the crash, but before the NES released in the west. But there is. And gaming was actually thriving. Just not on consoles in North America anymore. Saying that Nintendo saved gaming is like saying Apple saved phones with the launch of the iPhone |
This is one old bump. I believe I already explained it earlier why Nintendo saved the industry, even if the industry were left to it's own devices, it would ressurge eventually. Much like any industry, really( The music industry passed through alot of ups and downs, and you could say that streaming "saved" it too from becomming a shell of it's former self)
Games have always been a pasttime of humans. Tabletop games, sports, even roleplaying in sex are all games people make to spice life up. So in that sense, gaming would go nowhere. Someone would eventually bring it back from the dead and make it flourish again. Much like VR, in the sense that it was first brought up in the late 90s, but failed to take flight, and only now it is being revisited(and finding success, real success).
But the point is, Nintendo was the first one to do it. Nintendo brought it back from the limbo. The industry was almost dead in the Americas(as in the continent). So that's like 30% to 40% of the industry nowadays. Not to mention that, even if arcades were thriving in Japan, Nintendo basically created the consoles there. At least it made it popular enough to be a viable commercial venture. I am less knowledgble about Europe as a whole, but if I'm not mistaken, it was a similar situation to japan. Arcades were doing fine(nothing spetucular, as far as I know), but with Nintendo, they revived or made the home consoles even more popular.
As a side note, it's thanks to Nintendo direct influence that we have many beloved non-nintendo franchises today, like Sonic, Sony entire catalog in general, and so on.
And as we know today, since history is our friend, home consoles are what defined and pushed the gaming industry. Even PCs owned alot of it's inspiration(gamewise) to it's games from it's console brethen. And even then, outside of a few games, PC gaming only became REALLY popular by the mid;end 2000s. Until then, the home consoles had to carry the industry. And it's all thanks to who? Nintendo.
Like I said, if Nintendo didn't do it, someone else would. Maybe Sega would be the one to save it. Maybe MS would jump in since there would be no competition. But Nintendo did it first. That's why it saved the industry. And besides, if Nintendo didnt do it back then, and someone else did later, we consoles/gaming tech as a whole probably wouldn't be as advanced as it is today, because gaming would have to need to prove itself tyo be popular at first so that companies would start investing in it, and so on.
My (locked) thread about how difficulty should be a decision for the developers, not the gamers.
https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=241866&page=1