Alternate history: Sony don't join the console race

[SeaDaVie]

zorg1000 said:

SvennoJ said:

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.

I really think the whole “PlayStation made gaming cool for older gamers” is overplayed. That’s just a side effect of 80s kids becoming teens/young adults & graphics becoming more realistic in the mid-late 90s.

For example, let’s say you were born in 1980 and got an NES with Super Mario Bros in 1986, then got a Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991. That kid is now 16-18 when games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy & Metal Gear Solid released on PS1. Kids who play games become teens & adults who play games.

As for graphics playing a part, a bunch of games in the late 80s wouldn’t have been viewed as kids games if graphics weren’t so primitive, some examples are Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Castlevania, Splatterhouse, Metal Gear, Altered Beast, etc.

In 92/93 we started to see games like Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, Wolfenstein & Doom make waves for their depictions of violence, not because games all of a sudden became violent but because advancements in technology made the violence more realistic.

PlayStation became the “cool” console for teens & adults but they didn’t create that market, the industry was already trending in that direction and would have continued to with or without PS, what Sony did do was capitalize on the mistakes that Sega & Nintendo were making with their hardware in that time period and became the go-to console for those games.

I don’t think this is correct at all, the PlayStation represented a complete revolution in the perception of video games. Millions of people were buying it, teenagers and older people, who had never played video games in their life. 

The NES —> SNES generation was basically flat with the leading platform actually selling less overall (62m->49m). The PlayStation and PlayStation 2 generations were the biggest growth periods ever experienced. People didn’t stop getting older, there were always new generations of kids growing old and becoming teens who played games, and being replaced with new kids, we’re now at a point where huge amount of the game playing demographs are like 30+ and 40+ people. However the overall market never significantly increased again.