I can believe Sony did it. The PlayStation hit a lot of the right buttons at the right time.
Sega was dead by the time the Saturn landed. Sega burnt too many fans when they launched the Sega CD and 32X just to abandon them nearly immediately. Parents didn't want to hear that Sega was launching yet another system. Sega launched 3 consoles in 2.5 years in North America. Sega burnt all their goodwill.
Video games can be an industry of momentum and trust. If you keep launching and abandoning products, you lost the trust and momentum. Developers don't want to commit to a system you'll abandon. Gamers don't want to buy a system you're going to abandon. Sega had shown that it would abandon systems at the first hiccup - and try to get you to buy junk.
Sega's Saturn was also a weird system. It decided to use quadrilaterals instead of triangles and was complex which makes it harder to use effectively.
Nintendo's N64 would be launching a year after the PlayStation. While the N64 might have had more 3D capabilities, many of the games on the system didn't look as good and the 3D gameplay wasn't as compelling as the PlayStation's.
Not only that, PlayStation games were so much cheaper! At $50/game, it was just a ton more affordable than the $70 that N64 games were going for. By the time that the N64 came out, the PlayStation had a huge library of excellent games that were cheap. You even started to see older games for $25.
Sony's brand at the time was like gold. Everyone wanted anything with the Sony label on it. It can be hard to remember what a dominant force Sony was in consumer electronics. They were like Apple back then. When people heard that Sony was coming out with a video game system, everyone would think that it would be the best just based on the brand. Parents would hear the Sony name and think quality and reliability. Especially if they had been burned by Sega, the PlayStation from Sony seemed like buying the best product that would last.
Nintendo still did well. They have their niche. Sega had destroyed their reputation while Sony was the most admired electronics company out there. The PlayStation offered people a non-Nintendo system that they didn't feel would be abandoned and by the time the N64 came out it was established with an amazing game library that the N64 couldn't match.
My parents bought a PS1 shortly after they were available. We very much enjoyed it, but I _distinctly_ remember each time my friend brought over his N64 and copy of Goldeneye. The PS1 may have been the superior console, but Goldeneye was the superior game.
Oh, Goldeneye was amazing. I think that the N64 just didn't have as many great games as the PS1. But Goldeneye was such a truly amazing game.
I wouldn't even totally argue that the PS1 was the superior console. It came out first and the fact that it used CDs meant cheaper, larger games. That gave it big advantages. The N64 did tend to have more immersive worlds. Mario 64 was a totally different game from Crash Bandicoot. Crash was great, but didn't have the open-world feeling of Mario 64.
They were very different feeling consoles. I think that's where Nintendo has carved its niche: making something different. Sega was still trying to make the same system and they were no match for Sony. Nintendo has kept trying to do things a tad different from the Wii and motion control to the Switch and its portability. I think Nintendo knows that it succeeds when it can find something unique and different and fails when it produces the same thing others can make.
But the PS1's game library was just so extensive and cheap.
Similar experience, I nearly bought a ps1 but they were sold out everywhere. Then I went to a friend's house and played goldeneye. It was on a completely different level to anything I'd ever played before. Bought an n64 instead. Wave race and 1080 still haven't been matched by anything. Those and GoldenEye are my 3 fav games.
Sony also made the right choice in the PS1 design by basically asking developers what they wanted WRT to hardware. Developers didn't want the wacky-ass designs of the Saturn or Jaguar. They didn't want to have to orchestrate multiple CPUs or a bunch of proprietary peripheral chips to get optimal performance. Developers wanted a sane hardware design and good developer tools.
Totally! Too often console makers went with wacky things that developers didn't know how to get performance out of. Though that sanity was short-lived for Sony. The PlayStation 2 was a complex design that was a pain for developers.
As much of a success as the PS2 was, it probably left the door open for Microsoft. The Xbox had a normal x86 processor and normal Nvidia GPU (and the GameCube had a normal PowerPC/ATI GPU combo). The PS2 was a huge success, but I think a lot of it was built off the momentum of the PS1, the fact that it was backward compatible, and its DVD player. If the PS2 had been Sony's first console, they probably would have lost. Developers would have considered it a pain to develop for and Microsoft would have had a more powerful Xbox with an easier development platform.
I think the PS2 does show that developers will accommodate (if hate) wacky-ass designs if there's momentum. However, Sega had killed their momentum with the Sega CD and 32X with both developers and gamers so the Saturn's wacky design was the final nail in the coffin. Atari had been out of the console game for nearly a decade when they launched the Jaguar so they also did't have the momentum.
The PS2 was a bit pushed by momentum. Developers knew that gamers would buy it because Sony's brand in gaming was amazing at the time and it offered a DVD player so they put up with it.
> If the PS2 had been Sony's first console, they probably would have lost
I disagree. The PS2 had a year head start, a solid early lineup, and a built-in DVD player (this was huge). The XBox also had little traction in Japan, not just from a consumer perspective but a developer perspective as well. It certainly would have been a closer race had the two consoles released at the same time though.
What the GP is saying is if the PS2, with its weird architecture, was Sony's first console it may not have been successful. By the release of the PS2 the PS1 had a number of successful second and third party franchises. Third party devs were willing to invest in making PS2 games because they had five years of profits on the PS1 and a good relationship with Sony.
It took several years for third party devs to get maximum performance out of the PS2. Not that early PS2 games were bad but there's a marked difference between the early games and ones made after devs figured out how to better use the PS2's SIMD units and take better advantage of the GPU.
If Sony didn't have six years of history with the PS1 I don't think they could have gotten the level of third party support the PS2 actually had. Devs would have looked at the PS2 and had no confidence Sony would execute on dev support.
Sega was dead by the time the Saturn landed. Sega burnt too many fans when they launched the Sega CD and 32X just to abandon them nearly immediately. Parents didn't want to hear that Sega was launching yet another system. Sega launched 3 consoles in 2.5 years in North America. Sega burnt all their goodwill.
Video games can be an industry of momentum and trust. If you keep launching and abandoning products, you lost the trust and momentum. Developers don't want to commit to a system you'll abandon. Gamers don't want to buy a system you're going to abandon. Sega had shown that it would abandon systems at the first hiccup - and try to get you to buy junk.
Sega's Saturn was also a weird system. It decided to use quadrilaterals instead of triangles and was complex which makes it harder to use effectively.
Nintendo's N64 would be launching a year after the PlayStation. While the N64 might have had more 3D capabilities, many of the games on the system didn't look as good and the 3D gameplay wasn't as compelling as the PlayStation's.
Not only that, PlayStation games were so much cheaper! At $50/game, it was just a ton more affordable than the $70 that N64 games were going for. By the time that the N64 came out, the PlayStation had a huge library of excellent games that were cheap. You even started to see older games for $25.
Sony's brand at the time was like gold. Everyone wanted anything with the Sony label on it. It can be hard to remember what a dominant force Sony was in consumer electronics. They were like Apple back then. When people heard that Sony was coming out with a video game system, everyone would think that it would be the best just based on the brand. Parents would hear the Sony name and think quality and reliability. Especially if they had been burned by Sega, the PlayStation from Sony seemed like buying the best product that would last.
Nintendo still did well. They have their niche. Sega had destroyed their reputation while Sony was the most admired electronics company out there. The PlayStation offered people a non-Nintendo system that they didn't feel would be abandoned and by the time the N64 came out it was established with an amazing game library that the N64 couldn't match.