Ken Kutaragi claims everyone at Sony thought the PlayStation would fail. What went right here?
>>12564604Infinite marketing money
>>12564605/thread
>>12564604>What went right here?They threw money left and right and asked for little money in return. It was a long term plan because they knew they needed to install themselves to still be relevant 30 years later. Unlike other video game companies (at the time, until M$ copied them) they could afford to operate that way because of the money they got from other businesses.
>M$what year is it
>>12564605That's the xbox, but still failed.
>>12564604>good hardware>strong marketing resources>tapped into growing niches and trends that Nintendo and Sega were overlooking if not neglecting>succeeded where the 3DO failed>appealed to edgy teenagers in America>appealed to Amiga fans in Europe>appealed to Super Famicom fans in Japan
>>12564614On this board it's always pre 2007 and here is why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&list=RDdQw4w9WgXcQ
>>12564604The 18-45s male demographicSony had an infamous no rpg rule until beyond the beyond, then they released FF7 as PlayStation exclusive.The graphical leaps in FF7 were unmatched. I don't think even PC games did anything near as ambitious. FF7 was a phenomenon for PlayStation like Mario brothers was for the NES.Even beer bellied 40 somethings who never gamed before picked up Playstations to play FF7 and then found other titles like Resident Evil and Gran Turismo. I saw this with my own eyes as a teenager. PlayStation captured the young adult market who were growing out of their Genesis and Snes and basically created the mature adult console Video game market.All this was going on while Nintendo was aiming at kids and Sega was just throwing shit at the wall and generally being retard.
>>12564629I really doubt 40 year old boomers in the 90's playing fucking jrpgs or anything besides sportslop or warslop, is this post ironic?
>>12564629>The 18-45s male demographicIn the west they specifically targetted teenagers, adults and hardcore gamers in the first couple years. This slowly started to change mid 96 as Sony of US got a new CEO and once that installbase was won but even then the mentality stuck around for a while. If you check the previews/reviews of Spyro by the official Playstation magazines in the west you can tell they're embarassed to have to sell it and try to pretend it's a game for adults too.
>>12564632"hardcore gamers" = adults, they were the ones with money. There is a similar interview of the US CEO in another magazine specifically using the word "adults" but I didn't save it.
>>12564632No it's not ironic. It's like when 40 year olds in the 80s lined up to buy the nes because of the popularity of Mario. But the NES library was too shallow and didn't cater to them. The PlayStation library more or less catered to them with stuff like Gran turismo. It doesn't mean they stuck around. The 40 year olds weren't the key to the success just an indicator. But the entire 18-45 demographic was basically locked down with FF7,Gran Turismo, and Tomb Raider.Titties and cars and graphics first games with mature themes. It's not rocket Science.
>>12564632Imagine you're a freshly divorced 40 something dude in the 90s with no internet and sitting home bored watching tv with few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket, and some polygonal tits appear in an ad or news story about the "controversy" of Tomb Raider...
>>12564604Hey paid all the major Japanese developers so they would back his console and not Nintendo's. He also had Ridge Racer.
>>12564605Welp...
>>12564604Sony treated the PlayStation like the Walkman: a consumer electronic product with software that was on a CD, designed to be affordable and accesible. It wasn’t some pretentious piece of garbage that was hard to manufacture, and retailers deserved better commissions.Nintendo fucked up treating retailers like cheap hoes and selling expensive cartridges.
>>12564604>Ken Kutaragi claims everyone at Sony thought the PlayStation would fail. What went right here?Sega shot themselves in the foot twice, pissing off retailers in the process. Nintendo Ultra 64 was continually delayed, leaving a window open for Sony to build up a lot of momentum.
>>12564604Sega made Saturn's architecture too overcomplicated, fell out with the Western retailers, didn't advertise their own console for shit in the West, it also didn't have majority of sport titles the MD is famous for.Nintendo told the jarpig devs to fuck off, lost majority of the third party devs that supported the SNES, decided to make the 64 cartridge based to save money as they usually do, and then contantly two more weeks'd the actual disk addon that was supposed to come out in '97.Sony had good marketing on their side, but I wouldn't rule out the fact that their main competitors shat the bed hard that gen.
>>12564623I love compressed VHS footage upscaled to 4K 60fps. What a great remaster.
>>12564629>The graphical leaps in FF7 were unmatched. I don't think even PC games did anything near as ambitiousniggawut
>>12564843If you were alive and not living in third world poverty at that time you would know. I doubt you were.
>>12564605>implying the sadturd wouldve succeeded with a bigger marketing budget
>>12564605>>12564606Because that worked for Xbox after the 360
>>12564604>What went right here?Nothing. Playstation was brute forced onto the market. When you got deep marketing pockets like Sony you cant fail. 10 years later Xbox did the exact same. And it worked for them too.
>>12565180>When you got deep marketing pockets like Sony you cant fail. 10 years later Xbox did the exact same. And it worked for them too.ps2 had 70% market share to xbox 10%
>>12565194Doesnt matter. Xbox turned to profit years into their CALCULATED run. Thats what this is. You force yourself into the market.
>>12565170https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZyTZwunVrN4?feature=share
>>12565180This tendie cope has to end
>>12565170Unironicaly. . .yes
>>12564604>Ctrl+F CD player>0 resultsC'mon, same trick as PS2 with DVDs and PS3 with Blu-Ray. Selling a cheap media player gets your foot in the door, games or no.But there were a million games for it because they made it easy to dev on and cheap to release for. The N64 and Saturn architectures were complicated beasts, IIRC somewhat intentionally in a misguided attempt to weed out shovelware devs. Nintendo and Sega wanted devs to commit and most didn't
>>12564604>cheap (following the clever realization that the average consumer didn't give a shit if the graphics was a glitchy mess so long as it was 3D)>CD-ROM and hardware FMV decoding (don't underestimate how much FMV impressed people back then)>easy to develop for>unusually generous terms for third-party devs>unusually generous wholesale pricing for retailers>marketing targeted an older demographic with more disposable income than traditional for games consoles
>>12564604Nobody in the 90s was interested in children games except /manbabies
>>12565249I seriously doubt enough people really cared about its CD functionality to really move the needle. CD players had existed for well over a decade by that point and they were cheap, most people had one if not several. It was different for DVD. It was still in early adopter territory and expensive. People were interested but didn't want to lay down the big bucks. And here was a thing they were interested in that also had this secondary functionality they wanted.The CD was more important for CD music in games. The sheer number of people I heard say some variant of "and now we get REAL music in games" was amazing. I thought it was a neat novelty hearing the prodigy in wipeout, nothing more, but to so many people it was literally a game changer.
>>12564604nintendo decided to hit themselves repeatedly in the nuts with a hammer by sticking with cartridges, alienating all their third party. meanwhile, sega came out with a piece of shit designed to use sprites and pissed off literally every american retailer. a perfect storm of retarded decisions.
>>12565379>nintendo decided to hit themselves repeatedly in the nuts with a hammer by sticking with cartridgesI would love to know what the alternate universe is like where the 64DD came out within the first year as planned and anyone who needed >16MB storage could just launch on a NintyZip Disc.
>>12565387>64mb discsyeah i don't think that would have gotten ff7 on the n64
>>12565171not retro
>>12564604It was the only sony console that had games.
This is 1995 and 1996 games for the PS1Yes, it was very unimpressive
>>12565170Is this Bernie Stolar?
>>12564684There's kind of a cause/effect scenario here because if Sony doesn't release the Playstation then the Saturn probably does much better and maybe the 3DO or even the Jaguar manage to eat enough scraps to survive a little longer. But yeah, it was good timing. Nintendo never really lost favor but they weren't pushing the edge tech-wise and Sega issuing multiple Genesis add-ons they abandoned so quickly eroded their formerly rabid fanbase. Sony was doing what Nintendo wouldn't, had a clean slate compared to Sega's recent mistakes and was a known commodity in the electronics market so consumer confidence was there even if it was a new venture for them. There was a bit of an opening and they plowed right through it
Sony's marketing was too good. It wasn't just about how much money they could spend, they were already an established brand with expertise at selling basically anything. Sony made serious electronics for serious people, but also made lots of entry level products that far outperformed their budget competition. Their marketing groups brought in experience from that and were able to craft a media blitz that could appeal to everyone, since as was noted Kutaragi successfully identified that kids who had grown up on Famicom/NES were grown ups and not being catered to.
>>12565387The 64DD wouldn't have brought back the third parties anyway, it was a concession by Nintendo that they punted on when they realized they really had burned all their bridges.
>>12564604what is with all the "they bought market share" cope when the hardware was a sack of shit any penny ante company could match easily
>>12564604>They paid devs>They Brute forced the market with moneyRetard cope. They won because they did it right. They produced the best product on the market at the best price.They developed hardware that was easier to develop for using both C and C++ SDKs and triangle based polygon and shader pipeline graphics which were moving from cutting edge to industry standard *during* the development of the PlayStation hardware and are still the basis of modern computer graphics. and used the cost effective media (CDs) which were already in their supply chain. Sony was already working with numerous companies to produce movies and music and home entertainment hardware. They took the technical needs and problems and knowledge and experience from those spaces and applied them to the PlayStation.Look who did it wrong:PanasonicMatsushitaSNKSega (the Saturn used a C SDK and used pixel shaded squares to simulate triangle based polygons which used almost twice the resources to get a 3d "look" and thus was a pain to program for)Nintendo (the 64 got the graphics right and introduced responsive analog controls to the market with a cumbersome controller design and expensive peripherals and cartridges, they also used C and not C++ save for a few decent titles the thing was an absurd embarrassment)It's not just "money".All of those companies had money. But they didn't have Sony's media connections and experience. They also didn't take their businesses seriously. They thought they were making toys so marketed exclusively to children while Sony was watching those same children grow up and out of those consoles. So Sony targeted adults and ate all of those companys' lunches - and has been doing it for 30 years since.
>>12566371Kek
>>12565953>Nearly every one is an SNES or arcade port.Tekken, tecmos deception, persona are classics though. I remember they pushed Battle Arena Toshinden hard and tried to make it look like the next great fighting game series. I stand by my thesis that FF7 is what blew the doors open.
>>12565249Nintendo opted not to use a cd drive because of loading times - their n64 was a toy for children after all - and piracy. Cd piracy was rampant. It was far easier for pirates to reproduce CDs than Nintendo carts.
>>12566401Incidentally rampant piracy is probably what sold the PlayStation in the developing world.
>>12565953That list includes:Tekken 1 and 2, NBA Jam TE, Ridge Racer, DOOM, Twisted Metal, Wipeout, Wrestlemania, Mortal Kombat 2, Gex, Street Fighter Alpha 1 and 2, NBA Live, Galaxy Fight, Sim City, NBA Live, Madden, Crash Bandicoot, King of Fighters, Tomb Raider, Contra, Parappa, and Mega Man.For my personal appreciation list, I'll add Galaxy Fight, Vampire Hunter D, Ogre Battle, Puzzle Fighter, Wild Arms, and Darkstalkers.Not all the games were blow-your-mind stellar, and I didn't own all of them-- some I just played at some time or another via rental-- but all of these are typically accepted as "people really wanted these when they were announced." To say that the games on your listing is unimpressive, is to be a troll of the lowest magnitude.
>>12566371Arguably the most important thing they did was make third-party devs a top priority
built-in cheat code because their manufacturing was totally vertically integrated and they had to only pay for raw materials and labor. Nintendo and Sega had to buy parts from outside suppliers and pay whatever their suppliers felt like charging them.
>>12564604PS1 games were cheap to develop and one had 650MB of disc space full stop. Nobody had to shoehorn stuff into a cartridge and be limited by whatever ROM size was available or the publisher was willing to pay for. They were easy to develop too since programming was done in C instead of assembly language.
Legend has it that they stole the blueprints from Nintendo's secret lair.
>>12565249as he said PS1 programming was totally done in C (and Sony initially didn't even publish hardware register maps) while the other consoles required at least some assembly language
>>12564604squaresoft seeing the potential in cds over cartridges for rpgs and abandoning nintendo, which caused enix to do the same and all the other jap devs following suitif ffvii releases on n64 its just another 3d0 tier failure
>>12566486What's funny is a lot of devs in the end didn't like it, they felt not challenged enough. That was why the PS2 was designed to require more bare metal programming, Sony responded to some complaints about the PS1 being too easy.
>>12564604What worked was that Kutaragi knew how to take advantage of the CD. And not just its capacity, but also its ease of production. Nintendo, for its cartridges, required third parties to pay: - $13 in royalties. - a minimum order of 100,000 cartridges. - and it took a month to produce. So you had to plan ahead. Sega was the same with cartridges, but "only" $12 in royalties, and they didn't change their approach when the CD arrived (Sega CD, Saturn). Sony required $21 in royalties for the Nintendo-Sony contract... So when Kutaragi took over the PlayStation, he was aware of the constraints that Nintendo and Sega imposed on third parties. And while working at Sony Music, he saw how easy CD production was. Therefore: - $7 in royalties. - a minimum order of 20,000 CDs. -and only one week of production. Everything was simpler and cheaper at Sony! So at the console launches (1994 and 1995), there were more games on the Saturn because Sega had a better reputation than Sony. But by 1996, everything had changed.
was it successful? i dont remember ps1 being all that popular with the youth at the time. i don't think i knew about it till it was out for nine months or something. i know saturn was a failure but i knew more people with saturn and eventually everyone got n64, later i dont know if i knew anyone who didn't own a ps2
>>12566371>They wonYeah they won. And now take a good long look at the state of corporate gaming in 2026. Sony and Microsoft fucked this hobby beyond repair. To the point where even Gen Z had enough.>They produced the best productThey told you they produced the best product. And you ate the marketing lies up. >They developed hardware that was easier to develop forAnd thus creating a redundant platform for endless shovelware garbage. >Retard cope.Thats not cope. Thats literal history. These things actually happened. In the real world. That thing you seem to be at odds with.You are still a gullible brainlet my fren. Easy to tell by your desperate need to allign yourself with the perceived winners. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JQ3DGy_Jq-8
Hilarious how some are still mad about Sony being the only major player that didn't went full retard. They won that gen for good reason.
>>12565953>mysr>rayman>twisted metal>worms>gex>alien trilogy>die hard trilogy>crash>tactics ogre>wipeout 2097>final doom>soviet strike>tomb raider>pararappai won't include wild arms, but that's genuinely a great lineup
>>12566405i'm pretty sure contra legacy of war is dicks
>>12566839So you picked up gaming as a hobby of choice so you could enjoy conglomerates "winning gens". Arent you a special little snoyflake! But you probably picked the wrong hobby? Maybe the stockmarket would be more exciting to you?
>>12566827>Need to align myself I had an N64 (first) and a PS1 during that gen and basically what happened was Sony delivered a superior product while Nintendo basically stole my fucking money.
