Sony’s entry into the console landscape shook up the industry in a big way. For today’s exercise in alternate history, let’s say they never joined the console race; in this hypothetical scenario, how do you think the 5^th generation (and if you’re feeling brave, the years and generations that followed) plays out?

Interesting topic. I look forward to some of the answers.

It’s a weird thing to consider, because several companies were already exploring pre-rendered graphics on SNES, and fully pre-rendered games were becoming a thing on PC - Myst exploded in the 1990s. Saturn is the obvious console to take up the mantle, but N64 would clearly beat it in 3D graphics. The real thing for customers at that time is the price - Saturn would be expensive in terms of hardware, N64 it terms of software… the PlayStation won because it had the hardware price of the N64 and the software price of the Saturn - best of both worlds.

Would Square, Konami, Capcom, Enix, and others leave Nintendo this time around? Would they go to Sega? Or would PC gobble up some of that market since it was taking off with Myst, and without the competition from PlayStation?
I can see it going in all possible directions.

No offense, but this is kind of a lame thread.

Anyways, I think Nintendo dominates because they would keep the third party games exclusive. It is amazing how Xbox and Playstation existence was due to their competitor messing up.

In terms of consoles, the 5th Generation is pretty much just Saturn and N64 in this situation with not much else worth mentioning. Saturn probably cracks over 20 million and N64 cracks over 55 million, surpassing the SNES/Super Famicom.
Third-parties are left in a very awkward situation. Saturn is tricky to develop for, and N64 is tricky because of its cartridges and to some extent its wonky controller.
As @Jumpin mentioned, third-party either shifts largely to PC or to Saturn or N64 with the vacuum left from PlayStation. I don't think third-party would be evenly distributed.

And looking ahead to the next generation, Dreamcast could still very well be Sega's final console, but it would survive into the mid-2000s. By the mid-2000s, the industry would largely just be Nintendo and PC unless Xbox still jumps in, or PlayStation arrives late. 

We have to remember that Sega made a bunch of knee-jerk decisions because of PlayStation and in this scenario, the Saturn we know may have been different.

When Sony announced their target specs for PS1, Sega panicked at it being more powerful than Saturn and late into development added an extra processor which increased its power but also made it more difficult to develop for and more expensive.

On top of that, they bungled the launch in the US by moving up the date by a few months to beat PS1 to market. This angered retailers because only a select few were included, angered developers because they had games planned for the original launch and angered fans because it led to a post-launch drought.

Hypothetically without PS1, Sega doesn’t add the extra processor so the hardware is weaker, cheaper and easier to develop for (perhaps weaker & easier cancel each other out somewhat?) and they don’t anger retailers, fans or developers with the rushed launch.

As for 3rd party developers, the games that went to PS1 wouldn’t simply cease to exist. They went to PS1 because it was the best option but without that option being available, they would have gone to the next best thing. Games like Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, etc. would have still been developed. The big question is what platform would they go to? Saturn, N64 or PC or a combination of them?


As for sales

Gen+SNES
NA-~40 million
JP-~20 million
EU/Other-~20 million
Total-80+ million

Sat+PS1+N64
NA-~60 million
JP-~30 million
EU/Other-~50 million
Total-140+ million

Gen 5 had a modest increase over Gen 4 in NA/Japan and Sony deserves some credit for that but I believe the market would have continued to grow regardless in these regions, maybe not as high but still solid growth.

However, in EU/Other, Sony was the first to really break through in these regions and I’m sure they would have seen growth in the mid-late 90s without Sony, it wouldn’t have been nearly as big.

My prediction
NA-~50 million
JP-~25 million
EU/Other-~25 million
Total-~100+ million

I think things would have worked out similarly for Nintendo and Sega in the end, with Microsoft ultimately entering the console space with its "Direct X-box" anyway. However, some might say that Microsoft tends to copy the success of what others do, so would it have made a successful console without Sony entering first for them to follow by example?  Let's just go with "yes" for this hypothetical.

First, I think Sega would have had another console after the Dreamcast, since that system, like the Saturn, would have done better. But with Microsoft's money to make very powerful systems to appease 3rd parties, the Xbox still would have ended up the place that games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and PC games found success on and made their home (plus, better online).  Sega would not be able to compete on a financial level and, unfortunately, do not have neither the ingenuity nor the powerful IPs of Nintendo and would have bowed out after that.

Nintendo would have run into the same problem against Xbox that it did with Playstation so it would have ended up in the same place it is now.  But with Xbox prone to poor leadership, it would have left the door open for another wealthy company to enter the fray as a challenger so it probably would not have remained a two-horse race for very long.

Even the closest long term guess is probably 99% different from how the industry would have actually progressed lol.

As zorg1000 said، the Saturn would have been a weaker platform. Meaning Playstation would have had no great alternative. How popular was PC gaming during gen 5? I occasionally used my dad's Pentium 1 Windows 98 PC for gaming (had Blood, Commandos, Comanche, Tomb Raider, and RE1), but I'm not sure how it compared to PS1 globally.  Perhaps PC would have exploded in popularity a lot sooner, and console gaming would've shrunk.

The domino effect of that is just unimaginable.

The biggest impact would be the overall lack of growth in the industry, that was almost entirely powered by Sony’s brand and marketing. Sony actually made video games kinda “Cool”, especially in Europe.

There’s probably a very very good chance the Sega Saturn significantly outsells the N64 as all the PS games would likely just be Saturn games. Things like FF7 were just impossible to do on the N64 carts. Or maybe something like FF7 just didn’t exist and a much less ambitious FF7 existed on the 64mb N64 cart, probably looking more like Dragon Quest 7 which sold something like 200k copies in the west. Games like Resident evil and Metal gear would be the exact same. These games are either Saturn games or they simply don’t exist in the way they did, and these were industry pushing games.

Interesting. Sega would have looked at Nintendo as the biggest threat instead, so they would not have made the same dumb mistakes up to the launch.
Even before the announcement of PS1, Sega had planned the SH2 dual CPU architecture, but only with one video display processor. Almost no third party games used the capabilities of VDP2 anyway, so it would have mainly affected the graphics of Sega's own titles. The unusual architecture of the Saturn got it the reputation of being difficult to develop for, however, it is only a half-truth, as it did not really affect its library, the Saturn got more than 1,000 games (most of them just stayed in Japan), that is almost three times as many as the N64. It is more than the Gamecube, the Xbox, any other Sega console, and almost as many as the SNES. So clearly, this was not the reason the Saturn failed. Also, while it was challenging to uptimize 3D games for it, as that would require both VDPs, it was by far the easiest system to make 2D games for that generation.
Had Sony not been there, the Saturn may have been without the VDP2, which would have made it cheaper, simpler, less capable, but it would only have affected games that relied heavily on their capabilities for background rendering (NiGHTS, Panzer Dragoon), and not so much Tomb Raider, Quake, Resident Evil, Duke Nukem, Hexen. Alternatively they would have awaited the N64 a bit more, and decided to include the VDP2 anyway to compete with that, or use something even stronger.

Either way, I think Sega would have won the generation handedly, provided Nintendo went with the same hardware they ended up with. The N64s limitations were worse than the Saturn's. In this universe Resident Evil (though RE2 would still get ported to N64), Tomb Raider, Grandia, Croc, Castlevania: SotN, Suikoden are now Saturn exclusives. The Tekken series would most likely be Saturn exclusive too, since it was more tailored for fighters than N64. Metal Gear Solid probably too, if it did not manage to come out on 3DO; the Saturn would simply be easier to covert the game to, as a disc-based system. Final Fantasy is the more interesting. Square probably made a pretty good deal with Sony, that SEGA probably couldn't compete with. Square also had no history of making games for SEGA hardware. On the other hand FFVII wouldn't be suited for N64. My guess is the game would have been completely different, a lot less ambitious, but an N64 exclusive, same for FFVIII-FFIX. The series would not have grown as much as it ended up doing.

My guess for hardware sales would be:
Saturn - 70 million
N64 - 50 million

PS1 managed to draw in a new audience, which would not enter console gaming without it, they may have played on PC instead.

The sixth gen would have been very competitive. The GameCube would have been more or less as it ended up being, hardware-wise. The Dreamcast would have come out in 2000 instead. Microsoft would not have entered the console market, as they would not perceive Nintendo or Sega as threats the same way they did with Sony, plus PC gaming would be at an even better state. Sega and Nintendo would have remained competitors to this day, but the console market would be smaller, with more PC gamers instead.

You know you can simply not engage with threads that disinterest you instead of posting things like this lol