Did Nintendo save gaming with the NES?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Wyrdness said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

This is misleading. 

There was a huge difference between arcades in the mid 80s and consoles in the mid 80s.  (I'm talking about the US here.)  Stores were clearing out all of their consoles of every kind.  There were bargain bins full of Atari games for years.  The console business appeared to be finished and done forever.  The arcades were doing just fine.  People went to them regularly throughout the mid 80's.  The arcades did not appear to be in jeopardy in the slightest, while console gaming was seen as a fad.  It was going to be replaced by computer gaming permanently.  At least, that was the conventional wisdom at the time.

The most successful time for the arcades was easily the early 80's.  So revenues would be down in the mid-80's.  However, arcades were in no threat of going out of business.  The arcade business as a whole was doing just fine.

I have to touch on this as I addressed computer gaming earlier in what it ran into when the 00s arrived, the problem I see with people saying arcades and computers is not one person looks at the long run in their argument and goes off the basis that because Arcades and Computers were there at the time gaming would have survived when seeing how those two branches went in the long run casts a lot of doubt on this chain of thought. For example Arcades did fine in the 80s but in the second half of the 90s however they began to decline sharply this is notable because earlier I highlighted the plight of PC gaming in the 00s as at that point Arcade gaming was really on its last legs.

The point being the two alternatives to console gaming were both in a dire situation at the same time and with out the modern consoles keeping the industry going I don't see how gaming would even still be around if anything the Arcades and Computer arguments people bring only suggest it would have just delayed the inevitable. The NES rebooting how consoles were approached and expanding the market is also what gave the market the revenue stream to facilitate it's huge growth in future and attract the likes of Sony and MS.

I agree that consoles are the most important part of the video game industry.  The NES is what caused so much money to be present in the game industry and it did attract other console makers (Sony, Microsoft, Sega, NEC, etc...).

However, you have to also realize why the arcades died off.  They did not die because of lack of customers.  They died because of lack of games.  In the 90's, fighting games were so popular that at least 50% of the games in any arcade were fighting games.  However, no other genres were popular anymore.  The gamers were there, but the games weren't.  The reason is that most game makers moved to consoles.  It was far easier for them to make money on consoles, so consoles bled arcades of all of their potential games.

The arcade business model is fine.  Arcades are still going strong in Japan (or at least they were before COVID hit).  Arcades would have continued on their own in the absence of consoles.

The PC is a similar situation.  PC gaming really came into its own in the 90s with a combination of the mouse, Windows, DirectX, etc....  PC gaming still continues today.  Consoles do not keep PC gaming going.  If anything they hinder PC gaming, because consoles take away from potential PC gamers. 

I said this in an earlier post, and I'll say it here.  I think, without the NES, the PC would be the main gaming platform, but revenues would be about 1/4 of what they actually ended up being.  Gaming could survive just fine on the PC, but it wouldn't be nearly as big of an industry.