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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Best console of the 20th century

 

I think the best is...

NES 9 6.47%
 
Super NES 50 35.97%
 
Megadrive/Genesis 1 0.72%
 
PS1 50 35.97%
 
N64 18 12.95%
 
Saturn 3 2.16%
 
Dreamcast 4 2.88%
 
Other 4 2.88%
 
Total:139
Hynad said:
Agente42 said:

For Nintendo fans, Nintendo is responsible for everything under the starry sky. Without Nintendo, you don't have the major and bigger market for dedicated videogames. Imagine the impact of this overall. 

Without Nintendo, the US still exists and other players in the industry would have taken that part of the market in its place. What people with stance like yours suggest is that the US could never possibly get a product of interest from any other console maker ever, that the console market is dead and gone for good no matter what without Nintendo, regardless of how it is doing anywhere else in the world.

That’s a myopic stance, one that disregards way too many factors and contributors to make it possible to be taken seriously.

it's speculation. , dreadful sales of other players say otherwise.

Its negations and revisionism. bad Revisionism based on nothing, against the other player's numbers and market situation. Well against the history say.



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Agente42 said:
Hynad said:

Without Nintendo, the US still exists and other players in the industry would have taken that part of the market in its place. What people with stance like yours suggest is that the US could never possibly get a product of interest from any other console maker ever, that the console market is dead and gone for good no matter what without Nintendo, regardless of how it is doing anywhere else in the world.

That’s a myopic stance, one that disregards way too many factors and contributors to make it possible to be taken seriously.

it's speculation. , dreadful sales of other players say otherwise.

Its negations and revisionism. bad Revisionism based on nothing, against the other player's numbers and market situation. Well against the history say.

History talks about a crash in the US market caused by market saturation and the world just coming out of its worst recession since WWII. It doesn’t talk about the entire industry being dead.

The ones being revisionists are those who talk about the industry getting saved. The industry wasn’t dying. It was barely just getting started. 

Suggesting the home console industry would never have been a thing in the US if not for the NES despite steadily flourishing basically everywhere else in the world is utterly idiotic. 

Last edited by Hynad - on 06 February 2021

Hynad said:
Agente42 said:

it's speculation. , dreadful sales of other players say otherwise.

Its negations and revisionism. bad Revisionism based on nothing, against the other player's numbers and market situation. Well against the history say.

History talks about a crash in the US market caused by market saturation and the world just coming out of its worst recession since WWII. It doesn’t talk about the entire industry being dead.

The ones being revisionists are those who talk about the industry getting saved. The industry wasn’t dying. It was barely just getting started. 

Suggesting the home console industry would never have been a thing in the US if not for the NES despite steadily flourishing basically everywhere else in the world is utterly idiotic. 

The scope of the industry is revitalizing. The Us market get saved, in other words: open doors for other companies entry, later. Without this move, the possibilities will not occur. The Us home console is not been the same. The rest is speculation.The history demonstrates revitalizing, your opinion is based on speculation and don't have data make your hypothesis validate, besides wishful thinking and dreams.



Agente42 said:
Hynad said:

History talks about a crash in the US market caused by market saturation and the world just coming out of its worst recession since WWII. It doesn’t talk about the entire industry being dead.

The ones being revisionists are those who talk about the industry getting saved. The industry wasn’t dying. It was barely just getting started. 

Suggesting the home console industry would never have been a thing in the US if not for the NES despite steadily flourishing basically everywhere else in the world is utterly idiotic. 

The scope of the industry is revitalizing. The Us market get saved, in other words: open doors for other companies entry, later. Without this move, the possibilities will not occur. The Us home console is not been the same. The rest is speculation.The history demonstrates revitalizing, your opinion is based on speculation and don't have data make your hypothesis validate, besides wishful thinking and dreams.

The US market isn’t the whole industry, as I said before yet you refuse to understand.

The NES helped popularize the medium. It was the first very successful home console. That’s what it was. It did not save an industry that was still only just in its infancy. 

Last edited by Hynad - on 06 February 2021

As others have pointed out, it wasn't just that the industry was in a slump after the 1983 crash in the US. Retailers did not want to stock videogame consoles. Nintendo had to do a ton of legwork just to get the system onto store shelves. Nintendo told stores that they would only pay for consoles which were sold to consumers and that the company would take back all unsold consoles at no cost to the store, taking all of the risk on itself so retailers would have 0 risk. That's what it took just to get a limited release and begin to restore some faith in the console market. In the pre-internet era, if you couldn't get a product on store shelves you couldn't sell it to consumers, and that was a hurdle every company which wanted to make a console would have to live with. Other companies would not only have to release a good product with good games. They would have had to convince retailers to stock their product the way Nintendo did, and that would have taken much more work than most would have been willing to do.

Nintendo got some retailers on board and the consoles sold thanks to great and revolutionary games like Super Mario Brothers that people enjoyed and wanted. That initial success convinced other retailers that the console market was not dead for good and things snowballed from there. It was that combination of getting retailers on board and the great software that brought the industry back from the dead. Without the retailers who went against the grain and stocked the system thanks to Nintendo's guarantees, even Super Mario Brothers wouldn't have had the chance to sell since there would have been nowhere to buy it. Without games like Super Mario Brothers, the system would not have sold even in those few retailers that agreed to stock it.

Saying another company could have done what Nintendo did ignores the simple fact that Nintendo had to do multiple things to get the NES off the ground, the absence of any one of which would have doomed the system. What other companies were willing to go to such lengths to restore both consumer and retailer confidence? It was not inevitable at all that the market would bounce back, and all the predictions and declarations at the time that the console market in the US was dead could very easily have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies.



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h2ohno said:

As others have pointed out, it wasn't just that the industry was in a slump after the 1983 crash in the US. Retailers did not want to stock videogame consoles. Nintendo had to do a ton of legwork just to get the system onto store shelves. Nintendo told stores that they would only pay for consoles which were sold to consumers and that the company would take back all unsold consoles at no cost to the store, taking all of the risk on itself so retailers would have 0 risk. That's what it took just to get a limited release and begin to restore some faith in the console market. In the pre-internet era, if you couldn't get a product on store shelves you couldn't sell it to consumers, and that was a hurdle every company which wanted to make a console would have to live with. Other companies would not only have to release a good product with good games. They would have had to convince retailers to stock their product the way Nintendo did, and that would have taken much more work than most would have been willing to do.

Nintendo got some retailers on board and the consoles sold thanks to great and revolutionary games like Super Mario Brothers that people enjoyed and wanted. That initial success convinced other retailers that the console market was not dead for good and things snowballed from there. It was that combination of getting retailers on board and the great software that brought the industry back from the dead. Without the retailers who went against the grain and stocked the system thanks to Nintendo's guarantees, even Super Mario Brothers wouldn't have had the chance to sell since there would have been nowhere to buy it. Without games like Super Mario Brothers, the system would not have sold even in those few retailers that agreed to stock it.

Saying another company could have done what Nintendo did ignores the simple fact that Nintendo had to do multiple things to get the NES off the ground, the absence of any one of which would have doomed the system. What other companies were willing to go to such lengths to restore both consumer and retailer confidence? It was not inevitable at all that the market would bounce back, and all the predictions and declarations at the time that the console market in the US was dead could very easily have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Yeah... we need examples, and examples with data sales background it. 



Hynad said:
Agente42 said:

The scope of the industry is revitalizing. The Us market get saved, in other words: open doors for other companies entry, later. Without this move, the possibilities will not occur. The Us home console is not been the same. The rest is speculation.The history demonstrates revitalizing, your opinion is based on speculation and don't have data make your hypothesis validate, besides wishful thinking and dreams.

The US market isn’t the whole industry, as I said before yet you refuse to understand.

The NES helped popularize the medium. It was the first very successful home console. That’s what it was. It did not save an industry that was still only just in its infancy. 

We talked about US only. The biggest market to the date. Because Nintendo revitalizes the market, rebrand a videogame (toy sided), reformulate shelf space with retailers, accumulate big risks, and have a killer launch gamers. 

The retailers, after crash, don't want more dedicated videogame. Nintendo build up to scratch the new American Market. 



Also, an industry is most in danger of dying when it is in its infancy, before it has had a chance to build consumer confidence or find its footing. The other thing that kills an industry is when new technologies replace it, like the car with the horse and buggy, online streaming with movie rentals (RIP Blockbuster), or this past decade the combination of smartphones and the Switch replacing dedicated handheld systems. In the 70s and 80s when videogames were in their infancy the industry was very susceptible to crashes and to dying out and disappearing. Now that the industry has matured that is no longer the case. It would take a new product that renders home consoles obsolete to put the industry in a similar state to where it was in the mid-80s.



Some people take Nintendo as the Jesus Christ of gaming... And the US as the center of the universe. -___-

The industry in Japan and Europe wasn’t in the same predicament as the US. Why everyone of you replying to me is ignoring this goes beyond reason. As if nothing can throve if not for the US.

Prior to the release of the NES in the US, Sega iterated on the SG-10000 series until getting to the Mark III/Master System, which released in Japan in October 1985 almost the same day the NES was released in the US. The industry in Japan was enough for them to continue fuelling the industry of that time. If the industry as a whole was at its end, Sega certainly hadn’t read the memo.



Hynad said:
The_Liquid_Laser said:

This is half true.  For example, the Atari 7800 was developed around that time, but then they didn't release it for a while.  They held it back until it was obvious that the NES was successful.  That's because the North American console market was DEAD.  Not in a slump.  DEAD.

Part of why the NES is so important historically is not only the games, but also what Nintendo was doing on the retail side and marketing side.  It took so much effort with retailers and with marketing to revive console gaming that no other console maker was willing to do it.  If the NES had not revived console gaming, then it would have stayed DEAD.  PC gaming would have still been around, yes, but without the NES console gaming would have been considered a fad like the pet rock.

What you’re saying is an half truth. Part of the truth is that the industry in the US was in a slump, for sure. But in Japan and Europe, it wasn’t going through the same struggles. In case you don’t know, the US isn’t the world, and as such isn’t “The Industry”. And while it is undoubtedly one of the biggest markets right now, the industry at the time was continuing to grow elsewhere, regardless of the situation with the saturation caused by the second gen systems in the US.

(...)

You have changed the argument.  I am not talking about the "Game Industry".  I am talking about console gaming.  The NES saved console gaming.

We already agree that the NES revived console gaming in North America.
European gaming in the early-mid 80s was being developed on computers.  They were not developing any significant console worth mentioning.
That just leaves Japan.  

I do think another company, like Sega, could have made a decently successful system in Japan, but it would mostly have just stayed in Japan.  Nintendo had to do amazing things to revive console gaming in North America.  And console gaming never became that big in Europe until Sony entered the market, which is a result of their temporary partnering with Nintendo on the Nintendo Playstation.  Also console gaming, even in Japan, would be much smaller in Japan without the Famicom.  The kinds of successes that the Famicom was having in Japan were amazing in their own right, before the rest of the world even enters the picture.  The SMS could succeed in Brazil where there wasn't a significant movement in computer gaming, but not in North America or Europe.

In a world without the NES, computer gaming becomes the dominant platform instead of console gaming.  This is important, because the console market is naturally much bigger than the computer game market.  The C64 succeeded in the absence of consoles and sold about 16m units.  The NES sold about 4 times that amount a few years later.  That indicates that the console market is about 4 times larger than it would have been with just computer gaming alone.  Consoles are cheaper and more convenient than computers and that naturally leads to a much bigger gaming market.

So yes, Nintendo and the NES did save console gaming.  In a world without the NES, there is no reason to believe that people would have kept trying to make consoles when computer gaming had already proven to be successful.  The PC would have become the standard instead of the console.  And the most likely result is that the "Game Industry" would be about 1/4 of its current size.  Gaming would still be a decent sized industry, but still much smaller than what it actually did become because of the NES.