Did Nintendo save gaming with the NES?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Nautilus said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Nautilus said:

SvennoJ said:

Nautilus said:

I do understand where you are comming from, but your example comes from a personal experience of a regional occurance, whereas this debate revolves around gaming as a whole, in the whole world.

Bolded: There were adults that were fans of gaming, for sure, but the perception of the general public was that games was for kids. And that's the whole point. Enthusiasts exist everywhere and have different ages, but these discussion, about impacts to the industry and overall perception, is regarded against the overall public and/or society.

So yes, not only did Nintendo save gaming, but it also made it more popular than it was.

More popular sure.

Looking at best sellers, Populous released '89 on Amiga sold about 4 million copies, Super mario world released '90 sold about 20 million copies.
Myst, best selling PC game until the sims, sold 6 million copies.
Kings Quest V only sold half a million copies and was actually also released on the NES (but censored for violence and religious themes)

Save gaming, nah. Make it more popular, yes they did. They made it more kid friendly as well.

Yeah... It did save gaming, for sure.

As said before, if Nintendo didn't do it, someone else would, as entertainment is part of human culture. But many gaming companies went bankrupt at the time, and everything seemed bleak, then Nintendo came and proved once and for all that gaming had a future.

Myst, the game you kept going on about?It first launched in 1993 on MAC, many years AFTER Nintendo already launched the NES and saved gaming. Hell, the Super Nintendo was already out. Nintendo already brought back the industry and made it more popular than ever before that game you went on. The same was for this Populous.It launched way after the NES hit stores shelves everywhere, since the NES launched in 85 in the Americas and 86 in Europe. By then, the reputation to gaming was already restored and was already walking into it was today, so of course those games did well.

All your examples came after Nintendo fixed everything up. So yeah, they saved gaming.

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.

The bolded part is probably where we diverge.

You think Nintendo brought video games back from limbo. I'm saying video games were never in limbo to even begin with.

Yes, the industry was almost dead in america, but america is just a part of the world. Germany had over a dozen video game companies, now there's none anymore. But that doesn't mean gaming is dead in Germany. It just means games are not being developed there anymore.

About the situation in Europe, Nintendo brought consoles to Europe, but Sega were actually the ones who popularized the concept of consoles over there in many countries. Still, they had a weak market share compared to computers because computer games at the time cost about 5-30 US dollar while Nintendo's own games were at a starting price of at least 50 dollar, and their big hitters were more like $70+.

Comparing sales between computer games at the time and console games are a bit of a moot point considering how widespread piracy was in the days. In fact, the Amiga mostly died because roughly 98% of their installed software was pirated. The situation was a bit better on PC, but you could still count for about 10 copies for every bought game unless the copy protection was very good and hard to replicate (Lucasarts dial-a-pirate and similar codewheels comes to mind). Doom for instance sold less than 3M copies but was installed on about 15-20M computers, so about one in 6 was a pirated version of the game.

Just to compare Hardware sales, the NES sold 8.3M in Europe. The Amiga sold in roughly the same time 4.5M over there. The Atari XE computers sold about 1M in Europe. The more powerful Atari ST line sold a bit more, about 1.4M sales in Europe. The Commodore 64 sold about 12.5M total, and about half of those in Europe.

Now why did I list the sales of those instead of PC? Because those were mainly used as gaming machines, with being able for more serious applications on the side, while it was the opposite for the PC and Mac, who both largely outsold all these computers (they got less than 10% marketshare taken together after 1988) because of their increasing usage in businesses. But even with their little market share, together they largely outsold the NES without even accounting of the PC, Mac or even some more smaller or regional computers, like the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or the Amstrad/Schneider CPC, which all were also mainly used for gaming. Heck, the Atari XE and the Amstrad CPC were even both turned into consoles later in their life, as the Atari XEGS (XE Gaming System) and the Amstrad GX 4000 respectively, because that was their main usage anyway.

Long story short, gaming wasn't dead or even in limbo, it did just fine outside of the consoles in the americas, which were the only ones who died. Computer games thrived, Arcades did the same, and did so all around the world. In fact, most people outside of North America didn't even know there was supposed to be a videogame crash in 1983 until they heard about what happened in America. The crash was both localized and confined to a specific segment, and Nintendo did only revitalize that segment, but not gaming as a whole.