i say sony since they have such a huge first party development team that continuously pumps out hardcore titles.

the same can be said for nintendo, but their focus nowadays is the casual gamer.

think about it: the casual gamer would hardly care if their console maker left, compared to the hardcore gamer who would be totally devastated.

it would be bad for the industry if nintendo left because if you look at the sales for each company nintendo has won almost every week since the wii came out. so if nintendo dropped out now the industry would lose the most money. that is the only right answer. every other answer is wrong.

Well here's a question.

"What would this generation of videogames be like if Nintendo didn't take the approach that they took or if Nintendo's new approach failed?"

Sony took it to a much greater level, the PS1 & 2 are the best selling consoles of all time

 Expanding the market by brute force is not the same as expanding the market by actually including new demographics.  Sony's expansion of the market was largely due to its production capabilities allowing distribution of the PlayStation line in countries that never got video game systems before.  They did not change the industry in any meaningful way, they just made what already existed reach out to new regions.  There's a definite difference there.

Atari.





lol jk!

Nintendo.

Nintendo

i disagree. it would be business as usual in my opinion. same with the rest of 'em. sega left, and they were very big as well, yet their departure has done nothing to the industry. it's all about competition. if companies can't compete, that is what will hurt the industry. because there won't be any drive to stand out from the other platform.

I would have to say Nintendo ...

They are probably the only company that is large enough who contains the talent and desire to drasticaly change the direction of the industry. If they left the industry, progress would only be measured in terms that a small (very vocal) segment of the population agreed with and the industry would stagnate and shrink.

DOATS1, do you understand how markets work? I'm guessing not, or you wouldn't claim that the loss of the sole innovator in the industry would result in "business as usual".

Unstable markets (ie. ones that sell goods which are not necessities) require innovation to survive, there's no two ways about it. If you do not innovate, the industry stagnates into a cycle of simply improving what's already there, inevitably leading to either overshooting the market or experiencing severe market drift to the point that the market crashes thanks to a complete lack of any improvement (innovative or sustaining). The video game industry experienced the latter in 1984: game developers stopped innovating, all of the new titles were identical in practice, and the market crashed. An innovative intervention, however, revitalizes the market and gives it a new trajectory (which of course also has an eventual overshooting point).

So I ask you, how would it remain "business as usual" indefinitely if the market relies on innovation to keep from stagnation or overshooting? Without the sole innovator in the industry, how do you expect it would do anything besides shrink, crash, and be reduced to niche status?