Sony because they have a healthy balance of successful IP's and new IP's and they make good hardware innovations too, and in the past 5 years, they have been beating MS in online service as well.

With nintendo we have to put up with the same predictable range of games each generation and MS buy their exclusives so we would hardly notice if they vanished since the games from third party developers would still be made but for another platform.

Didn't know Fable, Project Gotham, Forza, Project Sylpheed, Infinite Undiscovery, Dead Rising, Alan Wake, Ninja Blade, Battleblock Theater, Shadow Complex, Super Meat Boy, Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, Kameo, Viva Piñata, Crackdown, Cromehounds, Bullet Witch, Onechanbara, Culdcept Saga, Deathsmiles, Akai Katana, Dodonpachi Revolution, The Dishwasher, The Gunstringer, Ninety-Nine Nights, Raskulls, 'Splosion Man and Too Human, among others, were bought by MS.

Oh man, what I learn everyday.

Some people will never be happy with their own. What they wanna see is the demise of others.

MS consoles been having Arcade and Indy games since the OG Xbox. Leading the push for better online services and better game mechanics in FPS and TPS(Gears) for generations but that doesn't matter. People want more of the same.

Why? The NES was not the first home console.

I am well aware of this but how many Odysseys and Ataris have lived to see 2014? How many Fairchild's and ZX Spectrums can say that they have revived a market that was so far gone? None of them. The NES was the beginning of the gaming revolution and everyone who is a gamer should know that.

Nice split between Sony and Nintendo. Common ground is that the majority believe it's not MS. lol

For all you people saying Sony because they are popular, or that not NIntendo because no one cares about the Wii U. Take a look at the name of the article. If Nintendo didn't exist, there wouldn't be gaming. Gaming would have succumbed to PC. 

Who would Sony copy if it weren't for nintendo? 

E.T. Nuff said. 

1983....

Nintendo was always considered the essential console gaming company until Sony entered the market. Microsoft felt threatened by Sony so they brought PC gaming to consoles. I would say Sony and Nintendo are more essential to console gaming than Microsoft is.

lol what a puney list... even then some of them like dead rising and super meat boy are not made by microsoft, im not gonna bother checking the entire list.

The fact that you automatically interpreted my comment as "MS bought every single one of their exclusives they have" and went on the defense shows how it is an issue.

im not saying its completely wrong to pay for exclusives, but if thats the default strategy for a company, then I would hardly call them essential for console gaming which is the purpose of this thread.

In that sense, Sony is much more essential because it employs the most AAA studios and more importantly, many of those studios are allowed a large degree of freedom... and a lot of the third party exclusives it does get is because MS didnt show interest in the game (same reason PS3 lost out on super meat boy, because of lack of interest shown)