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PlayStation is 10 years Old Today
pluke writes "ComputerandVideoGames.com reports that today is the 10 year anniversary of the PlayStation launch in Japan. Facing stiff competition from the already entrenched Sega Saturn it went on to conquer the market and define the modern games industry. Happy Birthday old boy, though I must confess was always a Saturn man." Sniff...so many memories.
The Playstation came bringing with it one very important factor, which is what I believe is the only reason it became as large as it did. It was easier to program for than the Sega Saturn. I'm sure that after a while Sony did things to entice publishers, but that is the main reason it got the upper hand. It's no secret that developers did not like the dual processor nature of the Saturn, and the Playstation's better internal structure allowed for titles to be made with ease. The Saturn did 2d very well, a key reason that it plays home to so many Capcom fighters. People seem to forget that the Saturn did very well in Japan, and was still doing moderately well even after the Playstation was killing in America. The surprising thing about the entire story is how loyalties were changed from the established name of Sega. That's not to say that Sony wasn't an established name, but not in gaming. It truely was a case of the underdog's success. While I do like what the Playstation brought to the game world, I do not favor how Sony has brought things into the mainstream. Sure it allows for more growth, but it has also brought about many unfavorable things. Your average game is now made for the lowest common denominator, resulting in unchallenging difficulty and bland properties. Don't even get me started on the Urbanization of games. Definately a key moment of gaming history.
That is the only thing Sony did right.
The Playstation sucked as far as hardware goes. Long load times, crap graphics, the console itself wore out in a short amount of time (only a new PSX sits right side up), the controller is an ergonomic nightmare.
I'm going to state the the SNES was the greatest console to ever grace the earth. Now that I have that out of the way...
The PSX was expensive and not very good. Why did it succeed? Nearly anyone could develop for it. It wasn't THAT hard to program for. Unlike the Saturn. You could distribute on CD-ROM. Unlike Nintendo 64 where you had to use expensive ROM chips which only came from, you guessed it, Nintendo.
Nintendo had problems back in the SNES/Genesis days with third parties. Green blood in Mortal Kombat? Missing Fatalities? People don't want watered down games. Sony fulfilled the gore/sex that adult gamers wanted.
The games were usually graphical nightmares, and the console wasn't impressive AT ALL compared to a PC in 1995. A Pentium 100MHz was pretty good in software rendering, and if you throw in a 3Dfx card that came out about a year later...It's no contest. When I saw my friends raving over a PSX FPS, and the sports games, I went back to playing my GLQuake, and NHL 96 at 640x480.
Compare an SNES to a PC game in 1990. No comparison.
Sony won by having a TON of games. They also didn't care what you made. They were glad to have you as a developer. They also made demo discs popular. You can't distribute cartridges with a magazine or pass them out at sporting events. Well, you could, but you'd lose a ton of money.
"The PS hurt nintendo, but so did their refusal to launch a disc based console."
That isn't all that clear. The fact is, Nintendo got 30 million units out the door while Sega... well their Saturn was a huge flop despite being CD based. Nintendo could not have released a CD based system to compete with the Playstation and survived. In order to get a reasonable cost, they'd have to toss the 64-bit processor and go with something less distinct than Sony's offerings. Additionally, they would have made less money on media royalties going with a CD based system. The gamers out there may not care, but look what happened to Sega.
A lot of people keep saying that the N64 failed. 30 million units is not a failure. A lot of people keep saying that the N64 lost out due to a lack of a CD-ROM drive. I can sort of agree with that. It would have been cool for that machine to have an optical drive. But not if the machine ended up costing $350 dollars. Nintendo would still have had a huge uphill battle. They did the right thing by making a cheaper machine that had better graphic capabilities.
The real key to Sony's success wasn't so much the hardware, though that helped. Rather, it was that it flooded store shelves with titles. Yes, many of them were awful. But when it came time to decide which machine to get, it was hard to ignore that the Playstation was where the action was. That is where Nintendo 'failed'. They're just not getting the developer volume they need.
Fortunately, though, Nintendo has created its own audience. Nintendo has loyalty that Sony just cannot have until they start creating their own AAA titles. In other words, Sony's boat could easily be rocked by another company with whiz-bang technology. It could be Nintendo. It could be Microsoft. Heck, it could be IBM if they were so inclined.
"Derp de derp."