Alternate history: Sony don't join the console race

[zorg1000]

SeaDaVie said:

zorg1000 said:

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.

Which part of what I said was incorrect? That kids who played NES/Genesis/SNES became teenagers & young adults in the mid-late 90s? Or that breakthroughs in graphics made the violence more realistic?

You bring up sales but ignore that the huge growth in console gaming during the PS1/PS2 era were mostly in developing regions.

NA

3rd Gen-~35 million

4th Gen-~45 million

5th Gen-~62 million

6th Gen-~85 million

JP

3rd Gen-~22 million 

4th Gen-~28 million

5th Gen-~33 million

6th Gen-~29 million

EU/RoW

3rd Gen-~18 million (most sales happened after 1990)

4th Gen-~22 million

5th Gen-~50 million

6th Gen-~100 million

As we can see, NA had steady growth every generation, before and during the PS1/PS2 era.

In Japan, there was steady growth before and during the PS1 era followed by a decline.

In Europe/RoW, yes there was huge growth during the PS1 era but there is a reason that I noted how most Gen 3 sales happened after 1990. Gen 3 & Gen 4 were in a way, a combined generation since most Gen 3 sales happened so late. If you break it down into 5 year increments rather than generations, such as 85-90, 91-95 96-00, 01-05, it shows a more steady transition.

For example, from Aug 1986-March 1995, Nintendo shipped a total of 15.01 million units of home console hardware in EU/RoW. 13.83 million of that was in April 1990-March 1995. I don’t have Sega exact figures but Master System have a slow start as well with most sales being after. The console market saw huge growth from the late 80s to the early 90s and that explosive growth continued in the late 90s and early 00s.

We can’t just ignore trends and market conditions.