| Jumpin said: both Nintendo and Sony set their own hardware trends, Microsoft clones Sony's hardware. Any and Nintendo are successful. Microsoft, even with all their corporate predation, has proven to be as unsuccessful as you'd expect an imitation brand to be. |
Actually that is wrong: Playstation is imitating Xbox, not the other way around. They are just far more successful with it.
Think about it: the PS5 is far more similar in design to the original Xbox and 360, than to PS1 and PS2. Being online, patches, DLC, online multiplayer instead of couch multiplayer, harddrives for patches, DLC and digital games, achievement system and so on. Even in genres PS has completely left the dominating genres of the PS1/2-era and switched to shooters, action adventures, action RPGs and racers (the last one were a thing always on anything). But that was the lineup the original Xbox had: Gears, Halo, Morrowind, KOTOR, Riddick and so on. The lineup of the original Xbox and the contemporary PS2 were quite differently. But while Xbox mainly kept this lineup, PS got pretty close and ditched series that were once their main thing. They sold off Crash and Spyro as they shifted their focus.
So I would argue in this ony is cloning MS. They just have the stronger brand, the more loyal fans (as this is often argued with Nintendo: look at WiiU to know the amount of loyal Nintendo fans and look at PS3 to know the amount of loyal PS fans) and better connections to 3rd-parties (as they were the saviour of 3rd-parties that wanted to escape Nintendos practices in the NES/SNES-days).
If you ask me what PS actually innovated I would be hardpressed. They are of the big three the most invested in VR, although they hardly can be said to have invented it. Other than that I am not actually sure they brought anything interesting into the console area. They excel though at refining and standardizing it.
