History of Video Games

http://www.thegameconsole.com/videogames80.htm

I would said yeah, the first gen winner was probably Atari PONG. I would add another gen after 2600, ColecoVision and Atari 5200 -  the era right before the big crash.  Coleco probably have slight advantage over Atari but they were pretty much neck and neck and Atari 2600 is still the most dominant.  (kinda like this gen with PS2 still king) However that gen came to an abrupt end with the crash of video game market.

As for Microsoft winning, I think they are just happy they stop Sony domination, though they definitely were blindsided by the Nintendo domination.

Yeah, Sony got a lot of things right with the PS1 and was very competitive at the time. Sega wasn't really much weakened (although their add-on accessories for the Genesis fizzled), it's just that they totally got the machine's design wrong. There's an anecdote (who knows wether it's true) that when the Sega CEO got demoed the Saturn and found out it had no 3D rendering capabilities he screamed "we are screwed" and demanded the engineers to retro fit in some sort of 3D capabilities. Nintendo was very strong with consumers at the time, but the industry disgust with its practices made easy for Sony to claim a lot of developers to its side and once the console launched and the sales became strong it just was a rolling stampede away from Nintendo.

The PS2 was designed to be the PS1 perfect substitution and upgrade, being 100% BC and releasing at an affordable pricepoint. It rode the PS1's coat tails to heaven.

Microsoft has already won this generation as far as I am concerned. They changed console gaming and brought in massive pipelines for revenue. It doesn't really matter if your first or second. You have to remember Xbox live is a cash cow that none of the other consoles have. 50 dollars per year from even 1/3 of the user base is 500,000,000 per year. Even if licensing was 10 dollars a disk?, Nintendo would have to sell 50 million extra games per year to make up for it. Not to mention that xbox live also generates more sales in premium DLC.

sorry but your wrong on segmentation.  PS2 was a viable hardcore and softcore unit with little competition, the market was not segmented between units based on gaming style, it was segmented based on lack of competition.  This is one gen where 1 unit is almost entirely centered around the casual gamer.  Casual gamers are around 40-60% of the market, not under and not over, it also depends on how you label casual.  So labeling such is entirely opinionated, I would revamp my opinion to at least 50% though.

agreed.

sony was taught a valuable lesson this gen, that price is everything.

i commend sony for taking a huge gamble on launching forward new tech, but ultimatly its to expensive for the average joe.

The only way that Microsoft will win a generation is if Sony drops out of the game industry and Nintendo falters again. The first is staged to happen, but the second is far less likely because Nintendo has already made their mistakes and are focused more on a new successful path. They are ahead of the curve and it will take time to fizzle back down.

Also, you probably don't fully see what implications this generation is going to have. Sure it is taking time for 3rd parties to come over to Wii, but by the end of this generation, it will be the leading platform with developers. Consumers are going to go nuts for Wii 2 as well most likely, as history has shown as well, and developers take a while to switch consoles as we have seen with the HD consoles, so expect another generation similar to this. The only way this can change is if in the next generation Nintendo starts to fizzle, but with all they know about driving the "what is now the casual" market, it will be easy for them to redominate.

Microsoft could still dominate after next gen, but they would have to seriously do some rethinking and structuring like Nintendo does, and from what we have seen with the windows platform, that is highly unlikely.

Price isn't everything, or else the Gamecube would have outsold the PS2.

Pricing yourself out of the market however is a different issue alltogether.

The PS3 is borderline pricing out of the market.  The only thing that may be a plus to the high costs/loss from the PS3 is it is likely that the next gen system will use much of this technology and will be much cheaper due to its establishment in the prior gen.  That is a game of chance though.

no.
either sony or nintendo will likely crush it.
unless microsoft buy all the third party studios.

Microsoft will never win a generation unless they buy one of the major players video game division (particularly Nintendo's) to guarantee a win.

They just never win without some kind of monopoly help, ever. I mean they do win in OS (though that's changing after Vista slowly) and in Office software (though again its eroding with open office, iwork and others) but only from the monopoly they created back in the 80s with IBM's help (and copying the OS of the first mac and calling it windows, see "Pirates of the Silicon Valley")

Since the 80s though there has been no new microsoft success out of dozens of attempts.

Windows Mobile tried to apply the windows model to phones and is now a distant 4th behind symbian, Apple, Blackberry and will almost certainly fall behind Android soon enough.

Internet Explorer was monopolied into Windows to make it hard to break out but as soon as that link was broken firefox, chrom and safari have cut heavily into IE's marketshare, it will be well below 50% before the year is out.

They tried to take on the MP3 market with the Zune, they're happy to sell two million Zunes to Apples two hundred million ipods

There are other failures too, but to get to the video game point they have done just about everything they could to get the Xbox into a position to win from buying exclusives and downloadable content for millions to gutting the price of the console to less then even the FAR lower speced Wii to releasing a year earlier. For all their effort they are behind both Sony and Nintendo in terms of console sales from release (their lead on Sony is 100% due to the one year head start). While they are close to Sony (maybe some could argue ahead) they are as far behind Nintendo as Nintendo and MS were behind Sony last time out.

It's really quite simple why this is. Microsoft doesn't innovate, they copy ideas that already worked for someone else. Windows Mobile was a lot like what palm was doing and what apple did with the Newton YEARS earlier, Internet Explorer was a rip off of netscape, Windows of Mac, The Xbox of systems Nintendo and Sony (and Sega) have been making for years. Even the lauded Xbox live is a take off of Seganet (and at least Sega supplied the ISP for the subscription cost).

Unless they are able to come up with something original like Nintendo, Sony, Apple and other such companies are they will never win anything where they are forced to compete directly without help from the residual 80s monopolies.

Sony may never win again, maybe Nintendo will pull a gamecube with the Wii 2, but I would see another entry to the market from a new company winning 1st (as Sony and Nintendo have both done in the past) as more likely then Microsoft doing it.

I may be wrong, but again Microsoft has tried to muscle into dozens of preexisting industries and has NEVER won (other examples include Live Search at 10%, MSN which bombed, playforsure, webtv, ect). I know some might just claim MS hate and say I'm flaming, but I'm really not just saying things that are untrue (or haven't been said hundreds of places before).

Here's a good link giving a rundown of some of the Consumer Electronics failures I talked about.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/2E6D9BB2-FE1B-4556-8389-67BD581FBCCC.html