Did you make this thread solely with the intention to brandish the PS1?

I don't think that Sony ever intended to enter the hardware side of the games market. The Playstation was a collaboration with Nintendo that didn't work out for corporate reasons. If Sony hadn't ended up with a basically-finished PS1 on their hands, they'd never have sat down and built a console.

In any case, there is no doubt that console gaming started with the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment system, and SEGA. I could turn your argument around and say that Nintendo is the only "real" games console company left: Sony mostly make TVs and HiFis, Microsoft mostly makes software for work computers...

I don't think so, sorry. The gaming market steadily grew even long before Playstation.

Have we gone back to the 90s or something?

I mean, people still buy HiFis (had to google that to even find out what it was )? Don't they have iphones? WTF? And I expect Sony make more money from gaming than from TVs too.

From a content standpoint, the original PlayStation brought a wider variety of titles and genres to a wider audience. If there were one "untapped" major territory left to exploit, it was North America. Yes, Americans have been gaming since PONG. But it was the PlayStation that presented console gaming to an older demographic in contract to the younger audience of the previous console generation.

:::Cough:::1983GamingCrash:::CoughCough:::

Literally the entire world except the US and Japan were untapped. I'm sure there's at least one major market in there somewhere.

Besides, the charts posted earlier show that console sales in the US never even increased that much with PS. Looks to be about a 22% increase over the 4th gen, which is actually the smallest % increase of any gen on that chart. https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9178405

Plus, couldn't you argue that people from the previous generation getting older also meant there was now a bigger, older demographic?

LOL - yes maybe not so much cameras and music equipment anymore.  I don't mean to say that Playstation isn't an important part of Sony, but it's not even a quarter of what they do.  I imagine that they make most of their money from their film and music side.

You do realize that the NES already successfully brought North America out of the 1983 crash almost a decade before the first PlayStation was sold in NA?  Nintendo went out of their way to package the system with R.O.B. to trick retailers into stocking it in their stores in a time when no one thought a video game console could sell.  The NES paved the way for the 3rd Generation to see a 125% increase in sales over the previous Generation.  Post North American Video Game Crash.  So yes, the market was steadily increasing.

For a while, Japan, North America, and Europe (which included Australia) were considered the three major territories for the console gaming market.  I placed "untapped" in quotes because before the advent of the PlayStation, console gaming as a whole in North America was still viewed as a child's activity while console gaming in Japan was simply another form of recreation for most demographics.  So the "untapped" market in this context was the young to middle aged adults who possesses a more disposable income in North America.