On 2 Feb., 07:00, nem  wrote:
>
> At first the anti-establishment types were rebelling against the likes
> of IBM. By the '90s, Microsoft had taken their place as the big, bad
> company. Observe how Apple's advertisments went from targeting
> IBM in the '80s to targeting Microsoft in the '90s.

Ack.

> Sony successfully buried two generations of Nintendo consoles.

Nintendo made some mistakes with the N64 on its own: One of
the most important being clinging to cartridges (which were very
expensive for the third parties as they had to pay a fee for
every produced cartridge and not only the sold ones).
The third parties flew to Sony in droves - including SquareSoft -
the leading Japanese RPG producer at that time. *This* really
hurt Nintendo.
Sony only wanted license fees for every *sold* game, AFAIK,
and they more and more targetted the adult market.
Also the CD format offered much more storage space - and Sony
made sure that it got used: They encouraged movie sequences,
sound tracks in CD-format and enforced(!) 3D games. In fact
they refused permission for many 2D games...

> The latter is only now recovering with the Wii. It really was their
> unbreakable hold on the handheld market that kept them going.

Ack. And the Pokemon-craze they served with the Gameboy and
N64 platform (remember the N64 with Pokemon-design?).

> The console market has always been determined by whoever has better
> games (and marketing). This explains why the NES could beat out the
> technically superior Master System, the black & white Gameboy beat the
> color Game Gear, and the Wii has been trumping the PS3.
>
> By the same stroke, the Playstation got most of the major third-party
> game developers, leaving the more advanced N64 and Saturn in the dust
> (also because it was easier to program for).

While I agree that the N64 is more advanced, though different in
some details, than the PS1, the Saturn is more different than
advanced. It really is a 2D-machine and Sega missed the 3D
trend (see the emerging market of 3D games and 3D
accelerator cards for PCs at that time). That's why most of the
Saturn 3D games look really ugly: It texturized the surfaces in
part with hardware sprites - low resolution - and offered no real
transparency rendering (the PS1 had 5 bits and the N64 8 bits,
IIRC).

The Saturn was launched about two weeks earlier than the
PS1 and its price was $399. Sony then anounced a price of
$299 and Sega already had to lower their price and therefore
anger the early buyers!

The N64 came more than 18 months later - of course it was
technically advanced - but the real breaktrough of the PS1 came
when all three machines were on the street: 1997 - with the
second and third wave of PS1 titles: Technically already very
advanced, targetting the male adult audience more than ever
and with very nice things like the overhyped Final Fantasy VII.
By 1998 it had stomped its competition into the ground and
Sony got cocky.

In fact, the N64 initially also sold well at launch but then faltered
because Nintendo didn't have enough titles in the pipeline and
they couldn't get as many third parties as Sony.
This is a lesson Nintendo tried to remedy with the Gamecube:
They made the deal for exclusivity with Capcom for the Resident
Evil franchise (at least for a certain time) and had other nice titles
like "Eternal Darkness". Ultimately, it was too late: The cute cube
was seen as a machine for young gamers and not yet as a casual
machine.

When the PS2 became the most successful console of all time
it did so *because* Sony not only got the "hard core gamers" but
also the casuals - with its EyeToy and several music games.

Interestingly, Sony wasn't able to recognize this new trend (they
expoited for quite some time themselves!) for it's next machine.
Instead they still dreamt of designing a machine powerful enough
"for the next ten years" - with a Bluray drive to support other parts
of the company...
They developed a new CPU in conjunction with Toshiba and IBM
(some even assume that Microsoft profitted from the knowledge
IBM gained from the PS3 project - which of course Sony paid for)
- which is always costly, put in expensive memory and a Bluray
drive (remember the scarcity of Bluray laser pickups?) - nobody
really is surprised about the machine being expensive to make.

With an expensive machine you have small chances in the
casual market and this is why it couldn't be as successful as
Nintendo there - fancy motion sensor controllers or not.

As long as the price level isn't at least on par with the Wii the
PS3 won't have the same sales rates.

Sony is fully aware of this and one of their first steps was to
effectively fire Ken Kuturagi, who was responsible for the PS3
achitecture.

The next thing they missed was the compatibility with PS2
games: The people still played their old games and didn't buy
the even more expensive PS3 games - and the compatibility
was dropped as a result (first the chips flew out, then the
software emulator). The price was lowered to sweeten the
ugly deal but it's still too expensive for the casual market...

I will never understand how they missed this big market they
were already acquiring with the PS2 and the EyeToy! Perhaps
they thought that the PS2 is still good enough to battle the Wii?
Big mistake - the Japanese love *new* hardware and gadgets.
A nearly ten year old machine just doesn't cut it.

Sony also underestimated their main competitor: Microsoft,
which is known to be a very aggressive, who tries to annihilate
every form of competition if possible and sensible to them.

Microsoft didn't give up their costly Xbox1-experiment and won
most of the hearts of American (and later European) "hard core
gamers with the Xbox 360.

Sadly, the design of machine wasn't really finished: The heat
problem was the only real thing that Microsoft underestimated.
The noise of the machine seems to be no real problem for the
owners, though, and it got much more successful than the PS3
in the same audience...

bye
Marcus
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32