yushire said:
So what game why PSX sell so much then? You cant just sell a console without games backing it up :/
About selling the consoles at a profit do you mean that its been done since the Atari years? And do you mean that even the original Playstation was losing profit in every console it sold? Do you mean even the PS2 with over 100 million sales so far was losing money in every console it sold?
What kind of business plan is THAT?!!
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The Playstation had lots of games when it launched. Way more than Sega or Nintendo at the time. Remember, in the US, the N64 launched with only 3 games, Super Mario 64, Pilotwings 64 and I forget the other. I forgot about Ridge Racer--yeah, that was the Gran Turismo of it's day (thanks NiKKom), and probably about the first instance since Pole Position that a racing game had such an impact on console sales. Like I said before, it wasn't just one game that made the Playstation worthwhile, it was a whole bunch of games. For instance, it had what was considered the best console-version of Doom (and from what I've read, the SNES version was probably second as it retained features that were lost on the Jaguar, 32X, and 3DO)--and back then, Doom was as big as Halo or GTA now (hence all the clones). I'd call that an important victory.
Tekken, Battle Arena Toshinden, and Soul Edge (or was it Blade?) were all early Playstation games, as was this little horror title called Resident Evil--that was also a first-gen Playstation game. Back in the mid-90's, few things were as important to a console as fighting games--and the Playstation had pretty much all of them except Virtua Fighter and Killer Instinct. It hit the market well before the N64 and with a lower price point--and more games--than the Saturn. These days, the FPS is king, back then, it was still JRPG's and fighting games. Square-Enix helped, but Final Fantasy isn't what made the Playstation a success--it was a success long before then. Remember, FFVII came out two whole years after the system launched. By then, a killer app in the form of Tekken 2 had already been out for about a year. There were 3 Ridge Racers, Twisted Metal 2 and a wealth of other games out by then as well.
And yes, the Playstation, PS2, PS3 (especially), Xbox, and Xbox360 all lost money on console sales. The PS3 was the worst at times (depending on price point and bundle) it lost well over $250 per system, meaning when you were paying $600 for a PS3, it actually cost around $850 to produce. The Xbox initially lost something like $125 per unit, but MS was fairly smart in that the Xbox360 literally only lost a dollar more (yes, $126) per console four years later. This was part of the reason the Saturn struggled so much against the PS1--it was $399 when the PS1 was $299. Sega is a much, much smaller company than Sony and couldn't really afford to sell the Saturn below cost. It's hardware was complicated and expensive--and developers were not fond of it whereas the Playstation was cheaper and streamlined (later, Sony got a swelled head and the PS2 was actually difficult to develop for, but more profitable so devs stuck with it). It's been said that only in-house developers at Sega ever managed to fully utilize the abilities of the Saturn and as such, it was considered largely technically inferior to the Playstation--even though it was only mildly weaker--about the way the PS3 and X360 are comparable now. But because it was difficult to use, most 3rd party devs never got much out of it. Also, it was the only 3-D system, I believe ever, to render graphics in quadrangles rather than triangles. The N64 and PS1 both used triangles, which is what devs were accustomed to.
Now, you're right that a system needs games to sell. But you're missing that there are tons and tons of other factors that come into play for the success or defeat of a system.
Devs and publishers unhappy with the way Sega ran things with the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn (too much hardware in too short a time), so the Saturn suffered and lost support.
Because the Saturn was difficult to use and Sega's "surprise" early launch pissed off a lot of devs (and retailers), it lost further support. All this lost support, and the recent history of hardware fumblings, was a harbinger of things to come--the Dreamcast had almost no chance of success. Developers had lost too much faith in Sega.
Nintendo kept expensive, limited, and time-consuming (to produce) cartridges with the N64 which both lowered production rates, made production more difficult, limited the size of games, and was expensive while Sony moved on to much, much more affordable CD's. The N64 had no way to really compete against the PS1. On top of that, the N64 was the most difficult hardware Nintendo ever made for devs to use (not counting the Virtual Boy which I'm sure had other issues).
The PS2 was initially sold really well because it was seen as a DVD player with bonus features.
New entrants into the gaming industry always face an uphill battle. Both Sony and Microsoft bought up development houses to pad the support for their systems. Microsoft spent an obscene $500,000,000 promoting the original Xbox--just to get their foot in the door!
Nintendo has always been really bad a advertising and promoting their wares, and despite them bending over backwards to make the GameCube extremely easy on developers, the black mark left over from the N64's failings--and the curious small game disks and horrible online support--kept developers firmly entrenched on the Sony side of the battlefield.
Now, for things like the Phillips CD-i and the Panasonic 3DO, they had their own issues. For the CD-i, it failed because it had almost no quality games, a low quantity of games, was seemingly unintuitive, and had almost no advertising support. The 3DO struggled with a prohibitively high price of $700 which wasn't lowered until it already had both feet in the grave. It had no real recognition, and the library of games was terribly shallow--though not as bad as the CD-i. Unlike the CD-i, the 3DO did have some advertising support from it's parent company.
The Atari Jaguar was one of the biggest messes in gaming history. An obscene 17-button controller, false advertising (wasn't a true 64-bit system, was two 32-bit processors), it was difficult to use, poorly supported and released at a time when game developers really didn't know what to do with 64-bits of processing power. This was at a time when the SNES and Genesis were ruling the roost and before the advent of fully 3-D polygonal gaming. It also fell in between the 16 and 32/64-bit generations--consumers weren't ready to move on, or had already made their choices for that generation.
The Atari7800 was little more than an afterthought. At the time, Atari heads believed gaming to be essentially dead and had decided to focus on computers. Then they saw the success of the NES and churned out the 7800 which was extremely limited in it's power compared to the NES, TurboGrafx-16, and Master System and could barely handle games beyond the vastly outdated style of the Atari2600 or 5200. It was doomed to failure.
The TurboGrafx-16 simply couldn't dent the market share gobbled up by the NES. At this time, Nintendo still had licensing practices which are, today, viewed as severe. But were seen as necessary at the time after the Crash of '83 where licensing was hardly ever done and companies would often make games of low quality for competing systems in order to harm sales of competitors. It was a fiasco and Nintendo felt the extreme control was necessary.
And finally, the most powerful hardware is almost never the market leader. For third party companies, it's easier developing for a weaker system and simply porting to the more powerful one than it is to make a game for a powerful system and try to rework parts of it so that it can be ported to the weaker systems. More power also means a higher learning curve (another thing that hurt Nintendo with the N64, NEC with the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine, Atari with the Jaguar, Sega with the 32X/SegaCD, etc.).
