what was the fad gimmick of the gameboy or ds?

Since when was a cd and dvd format a fad? Sony was brought into the console industry by Nintendo because at the time they were the best format making choice for consoles. When Sony joined the console race they popularized consoles as legitimate tech instead of just being stigmatized for kids. They cornered home console media market and amassed such an audience that it prompted Microsoft to take notice because Microsoft likes to corner home media markets wherever they are. Sony provides the most games from all applicable parties for tastes at an affordable price. This is why they generally win. They’ve managed to balance relationships between their first party and third party in the east and west. 

Playstation's success is a result of :
- discipline,hard work day after day, week after week, month after month, early PS3,TLG anyone ?
- thinking out-of-the-box, future thinking, yes, maybe they did the Cell, but they also did a Remote play, cross buy, people make mistakes ya know
- brave investing, funding games, AAA or not, 1st party or not, exclusive or not, just look at the number of the games in production right now, also look on MetaCrit, 19 games 90 or more, Xbox 8 games 90 or more, there is a reason for it, they want purely the biggest game library possible
-PS always was and still is the most consumer friendly console in gaming, January sales anyone ?

edit - one more think, the marketing. Playstation is always "simple". 

No, every PlayStation sells like this without a fad. CD/DVD are not a fad.

Those formats are also not the driving reason from a consumer perspective that the consoles sold so well, and if you say otherwise then you're being disingenuous

Well said.

Exactly. That was the weirdest statement I think I’ve ever read. PlayStation sells well because it’s PlayStation. It gets the most games ppl want to play. Games you can’t find on other consoles. From bloodborne to nier to Nioh to persona to god of war. 

You know after Sony's blunder and arrogance with the PS3, I was convinced it would be at least 3 gens before someone let their arrogance get the best of them again. Then Mattrick told me to hold his goddamn beer.

A "fad" is a short-lived collective behaviour of impulse. By definition neither PS1 or PS2 can be classified as a "fad" since both went on ship an additional 25M+ units during the year and well after the release of their successors ...

They weren't being arrogant. They intentionally risked the PS3 to save Blu Ray. They knew they would turn a profit on it, but only after a slow bleed. Blu Ray was dying at the hands of HD-DVD and Sony put Blu Ray in the PS3 to save it from extinction.  Microsoft later backed HD-DVD but their efforts fell upon def ears, so Blu Ray won the format war and HD-DVD went extinct. Microsoft since then has become a member of the Blu Ray association since Sony made Blu Ray the dominant format to succeed DVD, which Sony was the first to bring to market within the gaming world as well.

The PS4 is selling so strongly because both Nintendo and Microsoft basically did everything wrong with their consoles at the start of this gen. The catastrophic Wii U communication and thus sales plus the disastrous XBO reveal just meant that all Sony had to do is not fuck up hard to win this gen so far.

However, both concurrents have learned from their mistakes. Microsoft brings out the strongest console ever, has ditched Kinect and backpedaled on many other things from it's reveal. Nintendo, on the other hand, brought a sucessor to the unsuccessful Wii U with the Switch and this Hybrid console is selling like hot cakes, potentially outselling the Wii U even in it's launch year of 2017, so without a full year under it's belt!

With both its rivals having gotten stronger with drastically different approaches, it will be interesting to see how the sales of the PS4 will evolve in 2018 and beyond

Oh, and about the fad: It had one at launch: (by far) most powerful console. Yet another point to the list of fails on Microsofts side during the XBO reveal, but with the ONE X the corrected that, albeit way too late. If the PS4 and XBO would have come out with their internal hardware switched, I'm very sure Microsoft would have sold much more XBO and the PS4 not as much, though how big that difference would have been in the end is open for debate.