Alternate history: Sony don't join the console race

[SvennoJ]

DekutheEvilClown said:

The biggest impact would be the overall lack of growth in the industry, that was almost entirely powered by Sony’s brand and marketing. Sony actually made video games kinda “Cool”, especially in Europe.

There’s probably a very very good chance the Sega Saturn significantly outsells the N64 as all the PS games would likely just be Saturn games. Things like FF7 were just impossible to do on the N64 carts. Or maybe something like FF7 just didn’t exist and a much less ambitious FF7 existed on the 64mb N64 cart, probably looking more like Dragon Quest 7 which sold something like 200k copies in the west. Games like Resident evil and Metal gear would be the exact same. These games are either Saturn games or they simply don’t exist in the way they did, and these were industry pushing games.

Without Playstation I would have stuck around with PC as primary gaming machine.

PS1 marketed consoles to 'older' gamers like me at the time and removed a lot of the stigma that video games consoles were just for kids. The lack of PS2 would also have slowed down DVD adoption.
Nintendo would likely have been less receptive to 'mature' games, GoldenEye 007 might not have been greenlit.

PC gaming would have been much bigger in Europe without Sony moving 'older' gamers into the living room. MS would have far less reason to launch the XBox as XBox was launched mostly for the battle of the living room where Sony was dominating. MS earlier attempts at multimedia PCs for the living room failed as PS1 / PS2 did it all much easier and cheaper. Instead MS could have continued partnership with Sega as the Dreamcast wouldn't have faced competition from PS2. Online gaming could have caught on sooner as that was already build in to the Dreamcast.

Very possible mature games would have stuck to PC much longer while consoles would have stayed targeted at younger crowds.