What made the PS1 such a huge success?
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What made the PS1 such a huge success?
What made the PS1 such a huge success?
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Frick off.
bump
>Sony's brand image
>Sony's distribution network
>Using cheap CDs instead of cartridges
>Reasonably easy to develop games for
>Well priced console + cheaper games
>>Well priced console + cheaper games
We need to go back, bros
The PS1 cost $300 on launch day, nearly $600 in 2023. Same as a digital-only PS5 or Series S. New games were $50, which is like $80 now.
>PS5 digital costs $600
Me buying the PS5 slim with a disk drive for $500 days ago begs to differ.
>The PS1 cost $300 on launch day, nearly $600 in 2023.
they quickly dropped the price to $199 though.
>New games were $50
As far as I know it was $40-50, but depends on year / place / game (multi-CD was a thing). Some claim they were $30-40, but maybe that's later years. Greatest Hits obviously cost lower. and lastly, there was no DLC etc. to inflate the cost.
That was late 1996, they dropped the price because N64 launched at $199
ok but still. PS1 lasted until 2001 and then some. selling it for 5 years for $200 and under wasn't bad. 1996 was the first year it started getting actually famous games like TR / Crash anyway, even before FF7.
2005*
>PS1 lasted until 2001 and then som
Please somebody telll him about monster INC bundle, philosopher psone bundle and chamber of secrets psone bundle.
Ps1 got games up until around 2004 iirc, it probably helped that the PS2 could play those games too.
Nowadays we're lucky that the PS5 can play ps4 games, anything prior is off limits
>the ability to have a single console that plays all 5 PS generations exists
>but it wont happen cuz $
life is pain
It's really sad seeing Sony go from the big ass PS3 playing every PlayStation game up to that point, to suddenly them stepping back with the Slim (just ps1 games and ps3 games) and then just fully giving up with ps5. Would have been the raddest shit if I could just put any game with the word "Playstation" on the disc and it just works on the PS5 regardless of age.
Reselling old games in digital just feels like a pathetic compromise.
PS4 can't even play CDs (no red laser), was fricking shocked to find that out after putting one in.
Compared to games on other platforms, 50bux in 90s money was pretty fricking cheap, and so was the PS1 itself.
Also greatest hits re-releases that were cheaper.
My point was when adjusted for inflation, modern games and consoles are often cheaper than they were in the 90s.
Not him but wages haven't adjusted for inflation that's the issue, the majority of people aren't benefiting from it because they simply aren't being paid what they should be in relation to how everything has gone up.
i dunno about that, i clearly remember reading a flyer from a local department store that listed star wars: shadows of the empire for $100 CAD at the end of 1996. that's about $178 CAD today.
1 USD ≠ 1 canuckbuck
It was also nice alternative to Nintendo's iron fisted policies
Sony owning the CD pressing factories, being able to burn money on ads/3rd party bribing and tanking hardware loss like it's nothing.
>money
Nintendo was rich enough to survive two commercial failures in a row and it didn't make the N64 and GC sell as much as the PS1 and PS2. This reads like cope
Just because they both had enough money to survive failure doesn't mean they both knew what they were doing. How are these two ideas mutually exclusive?
The point is these Anons are talking as if Sony sold more literally just because they have money and no other reason
Mmh, sold more, maybe, because of that advertising budget, but they definitely were free to take risks at no cost, which would definitely help everything else regardless.
So both Nintendo and Sony had tons of money, yet the PS1 sold much more than the N64. Must be because Sony was lucky and poor Nintendo couldn't do anything against unfair forces completely out of their control who used underhanded tactics against them
Exactly, people don't understand how horrible Sony was to Nintendo during that era. Both Sony and Sega could learn a thing or 2 about the proper way to treat your developers business partners from nintendo
Are you joking me? Nintendo has the LONGest list of sins and violations when it comes to fricking people over, backstabbing, betrayals, awful demeanor, attitude, and arrogance. Just because their handhelds kept them afloat doesn't mean they haven't been historically jackasses, and still are with their business model. *What* are you talking about?
Are you kidding? The only reason the PS1 even exists is because Nintendo backed out of the deal with Sony for a CD based system when the work was already halfway done.
The frick? I'm anti-Nintendo. I'm just saying money helps dude. Why is everything reduced to tribalism on here.
Zoomies are all marxists who think material wealth is the only thing that matters in life.
>Nintendo was rich enough
Nintendo doesn't sell their products at a loss like Sony or Sega or Microsoft. Nintendo designs affordable hardware that's several steps below the bleeding edge. So each console sold still makes money for them.
You think Gameboy or Gameboy pocket was the best Nintendo could do? Of course not. But that's the way Nintendo does things. They are a very financially strict company when it comes to spending.
>Nintendo designs affordable hardware that's several steps below the bleeding edge
>hardware that's several steps below the bleeding edge
Maybe now but none of the console they made before the Wii was several steps below the bleeding edge
>Nintendo designs affordable hardware that's several steps below the bleeding edge
GC?
Yes, the GC is a generation behind the PS2. RE4 only had better graphics on the GC because Iwata sent death threats to various Capcom executives
> Iwata sent death threats to various Capcom executives
What a fricking c**t. You can always count on backhanded Nintendo yakuza tactics. Frickin Shinto black magic
Yeah, this. Even if you don't own the market, if you're the one company pulling a profit...aren't you the ones actually winning?
Those commercial failures still turned a profit for them. They even turned a profit from the fricking WiiU. They never operate at a loss.
piracy and only that.
>ps1 games could be pirated with relative ease.
>consoles sold at higher prices so the prices didn't impact them in any way and never loss money.
>anyone could launch a game on sony consoles due to not selling licenses.
is quite easy to know why.
>nintendo sold consoles at prices that made them lose money yet they recovered with licensing.
>sega sold consoles at prices that made them lose money yet they recovered money with licensing.
in the end $ony survived through piracy until ps3 same as micro$oft.
sony never tanked hardware loss at any moment,for example a document said that ps1 consoles price for sony with everything even sending them worldwide didn't cost sony more then 120 dollars for unit,take as an example sega saturn costs,costed sega around 350 dollars per unti yet they sold them at a lower price.
Money.
This. Money. It doesn't matter what you do when you have no consequences for failure. You can just brute force success. Also got quads in the captcha.
Counterpoint: Xbox. Only the 360 was a real market success, and mainly through the luck of being an early adopter to online-oriented PVP games.
Psygnosis shrinking the entire PSX devkit into two regular PC cards, making it incredibly cheap and easy to use for third party developers.
The N64 had something similar with the "Bung Doctor V64", but that was soon outlawed. The dev kits Nintendo themselves provided were very expensive, yet another reason why that console flopped so badly.
Dev kits were not "sold" as such. You paid a large sum of money to temporarily have a revokable dev kit that Sony/Nintendo/SEGA could ask for back at any time. The price isn't really relevant as they were really only given to big publishers. Anon's Dev Studio would have been told to frick off by all 3 at the time and that's why people had to sign deals with the devil, porting shovelware instead of making original games, so a publisher could loan them one of their dev kits.
The Bung was technically a way to run your code on a retail machine but it was NOT a substitute for a dev kit in any way shape or form, that's why it was so easy to get it shut down as a piracy device. On the PS1 you could flash gen 1 action replays into "development kits" but they had to replace those quickly because Sony threatened them. But you were never really going to develop a commercial grade game on them, it's too difficult.
The device in
is not a dev kit by itself, it's the interface board for the dev kit which was usually a blue PS1 which had double the RAM and more interrupt hooks, and this is what the difference between a Bung/AR and a dev kit is. With the real dev kit you can upload the large debug builds with all the symbols, freeze execution on a certain instruction or trap a memory location, then step through the code on your Win9x PC, watching the RAM values update. And if it crashes it'll give you crash dumps that you can analyse in the debugger.
>NOT a substitute for a dev kit
commercial games were developed with it though. Acclaim used it to develop turok. They were missing the more advanced debugging features, but the whole point was that they were able to run unsigned code streamed from the parallel port of a PC.
>The Bung was technically a way to run your code on a retail machine but it was NOT a substitute for a dev kit in any way shape or form
Total bullshit. I know several companies that used them. I even took a few v64s home when one of them went bust. Youtube lied to you again kiddo.
Which companies?
Oh, just some little unknown companies like Acclaim and 3DO. Also a lot of actual little companies.
I would believe you would believe all kinds of silly things about a system you've never used that few people have used in your lifetime. Don't take my word for it. Do your gogglesmart shit and you'll find this is common knowledge.
I would believe that testers used them, or maybe artists/designers. Engineers would need additional hardware for debugging purposes.
It turns out that video game companies making hardware is a bad proposition.
And now years later we're realizing that home appliance companies making software is an even worse deal
Europeans buying Fifa.
Bassadissimo
Pro Evo better
What about this is football?
more like this is shite m8
Pro Evo GOAT
Yep, that is football.
American bros, our response?
i miss fifa 05 postan
this
Crazy to think europe never got final fantasy before 7
fifa was available on N64 up until fifa 99
You forgot also:
Gran turismo 1 and 2
Colin Mcrae 1 and 2
The whole tomb raider series
Residen evil series
croc
Medievil
soulblade
tekken series
F1 games
Rally games
Moto racer games
Sport games
and the list goes on...
Actually IT goes on with:
FFVII
driver
ridge racer 4
soul reaver
wipeout series
destruction devery series
LMA MANAGER
It had games unlike the n64 and real 3d games unlike the shiturn
Sony having an overall much deeper capital base to be able to buy market dominance through sheer attrition. When you have more assets/resources to play with/burn through than your competitors, you will ultimately win in a capitalist marketplace.
>Sony having an overall much deeper capital base to be able to buy market dominance through sheer attrition
/thread
With deep pockets like Sonys there was no winning for the competition. Sony brute forced into the market. And xbox followed that playbook in 2001.
Superior, genre, generation defining games that revolutionized 3D and the industry as a whole.
>What made the PS1 such a huge success?
Because it was cheap and it had games.
It had GAMES!
Plus Nintendo not selling N64s in Europe until 1997, and not having as many GAMES!
Plus Sega shitting the bed post-Mega Drive, and the Saturn not having as many GAMES!
Not reading the THREAD!
Well you should, homosexual. Those anons worked very hard on those responses.
Yeah, just not this guy:
>Dino hill
>silent crisis
Frick I need to go to sleep
God, I wish that were me.
these:
-Piracy
-Dubs in French, Italian, Deutsch, Portuguese and French
-Games, more games and then more games
-Every genre has at least 10 entries by different developers
-also good marketing
What's with the gap? What are you hiding?
N64 didn’t have enough games and Saturn had a bipolar GPU because Sega at the last second wanted 3D capabilites.
piracy and modding
The simple answer is that owning CD pressing plants from their involvement in the music industry gave them an advantage in distribution and licensing costs.
Modchip
$299
Nintendo alienating all its third parties by choosing to make games on expensive cartridges, being harder to program for, with limited storage. Also releasing a year after the Playstation. Tl;DR version: Nintendo shot themselves in the foot giving Sony their edge for not just one generation but two
Most success is just other people fricking up, I've realized.
>Nintendo alienating all its third parties by choosing to make games on expensive cartridge
How is their current relationship with third parties?
Everyone came crawling back with the success of the Wii. And while more expensive to produce than Blu-rays, the Switch cartridges are still nowhere near the handicap that N64 carts were. No shit developers wanted to make their dream games with 700mb of space as opposed to 32mb.
Being released before the N64
movie cutscenes
poverty friendly since everyone can just burn games
coomer pandering
homosexual pandering
/thread
>Those thick PAL cases.
I appreciate that we needed big boxes to store manuals with 6 different languages in them, but I hate proprietary cases. Impossible to replace, especially if you want the holographic sticker.
At least they were better than PAL Saturn cases.
Japan used the same cases for a large number of games.
Targeting idiots, sports fans, coomers, kids who want to be cool. Most people are idiots
>coomers
Didn't exist 30 years ago. You can't rewrite history.
If coomers didn't exist who were all the people clamouring for nude codes for tomb raider?
Regular boys and men.
>i invented fapping
Many such zoomers
You fricking moron, people went out more back then and didn't have made-up illnesses online.
Imagine getting this bootyblasted when confronted with the fact that you didn't invent fapping.
>b-b-but my mommy told me no one else has ever done it
This. You have to be really high IQ to appreciate something like Super Mario 64. Nintendo games demand a much higher level of intelligence to be enjoyed compared to something like Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill
>I’ve spent two decades pondering the lives of the people in the background town in wet dry world
>where are they… Italy, Greece, the Azores?
>what do they do?
>they’re probably artisan craftsman. Making fantastical things and doodads for Mario’s adventures
>where are they now?
>How many are still alive?
>they don’t send post cards, maybe I can send them a postcard through the game
You could be a tendietuber
Copy pasta
Games were made for kids and teenagers back in those days.
And why I have to be intellectual to appreciate a plumber saving a princess from turtle warlord.
I was popular growing up and played it all the time. So did everyone else I knew
You sound bitter
>What made the PS1 such a huge success?
The games. Specifically the quantity of quality releases.
With N64 you had only two good Nintendo or Rare games per year and all others were Midway westoge.
Being able to rent games and burn them. Some of my friends had like 500 games
I bet Sony sold a shitton of CD burners. Probably offset that hardware loss on the console
PS1 was an additive blending and 60FPS powerhouse that was cheap and easy to program, that's pretty much it.
>60FPS powerhouse
Not for Europoor OP it wasn't.
Look at my awesome PS1 Colle... oh wait. It's shitty worthless PAL games. Wamp wamp.
Sony was a media giant. They had (and still do have) connections in several industries. Because they have never been in the video game industry, they treated it like an entertainment platform (uh ironically), so what did they do? They used money to pay people to make games for their console. It gave a foundation to programmers who might have been stuck making shitty 3D graphics for someone else or maybe silently die making warez for a non-existent demographic.
The did it again with the PSP when they needed an excuse to invite indie development onto the PSN store because they needed games for the PSP Go in order to demonstrate downloadable games or something.
Nintendo stabbed Sony in the back and inadvertently created its biggest competitor. Had Nintendo simply went through with the deal we'd be living in a Nintendo gaming industry monopoly
It was marketed to regular people instead of kids/man children.
cd
quality
audio
>cd quality audio
>90% of ps1 games that stream don't even use redbook audio (44.1Khz stereo) but instead a proprietary xa format that's lower quality (caps out at 37.8Khz stereo, compressed even)
the human ear cannot hear a difference of 6.3khz
So you dont hear a difference between a low E at octave 1 and a high G at octave 8 ?
Pretty sure thats only you pal you might be deaf and not know it.
>don't even use redbook audio (44.1Khz stereo) but instead a proprietary xa format that's lower quality
The Resident Evil games don't even use that and basically play samples for it's music like N64 games. If you don't believe me load up RE2 or RE3, go into any area where there's music and press the start button to pause the game (not the inventory button). When you resume you'll only start hearing something when the next note starts playing and any sustained note that started playing before you paused won't be there. Mess around with the pause button and you'll see what I mean
>cheap console to buy
>cheap to develop for
>cheap to publish for
The above results in it having a huge library and huge install base
It would've been weird if it wasn't successful
If it's just money then why has Microsoft just been hanging in there rather being a dominant force like Sony?
Hmmm... What group of people would grasp at straws to try to attribute the commercial success of a console to literally anything except it's good library...
Piracy.
It came at a point in time where there was a huge hunger for 3D games but not everyone could afford a PC, also easy to program for which enabled a lot of 3rd party devs who basically carried the system. Sega being complacent and out of touch. 2 year headstart on Nintendo and the CD based media kept games cheap compared to carts.
Sony was just an epitome of being "at the right place at the right time". They simply came and did everything right. The competition was in a bit of a mess, and 3rd parties were sick of Nintendo's tyrannic policies. Sony waltzed in at the right time and made an affordable CD machine with good enough specs. They welcomed devs with open arms, their dev kit revolutionized the industry, and their CD facilities allowed the games to be shipped much faster. result: 3rd parties left Nintendo for Sony, along with newcomers they made some of the defining games of the generation, and the rest was history.
sure, it wasn't all THAT great in the end, the games didn't age all that well, no Z-buffer, yadda yadda… but guess what? $299, it was good enough, no one cared. Nintendo was busy proving they could alone support a whole cart-based console, Sega was busy fricking everything up with Saturn, while Sony just did everything right.
>In Japan
Sony and CD functionality very well-regarded, offered a great alternative to the Sega Saturn that excelled at 3D and featured a large number of popular JRPG's while launching over a year and a half ahead of the N64 with strong Japanese third-party support.
>In the United States
Offered edgier, more mature games than Nintendo while being marketed and distributed far more effectively than the Saturn and having better hardware.
>In Europe
Fulfilled a niche left-behind by the discontinuation of the Amiga, offering a powerful system easy for devs to come to grips with while being significantly cheaper than Windows PC's that were becoming the standard for other software.
I was going to come in here to mention this. I am from the US and I am sure it was similar in a lot of towns around the country but the PS1 was the new "Cool" system. Sega and Nintendo were for babies. Everyone in my school that played games got super edgy. I remember having to be quite about seeing the Pokemon movie with a friend because neither of us want people to think we were not cool Playstation gamers.
I don't think Sega was necessarily seen as being for babies since the Genesis had a certain degree of edginess over Nintendo, but the Saturn just didn't appeal to American audiences in the same way the Genesis did for a number of reasons and the PSX ultimately usurped its place as the "cool" console.
It's because the Saturn had no games.
Pretty much tbh
>No one in the US gave a shit about Virtua Fighter compared to Mortal Kombat or Tekken.
>Nights' gay effeminate Jester mascot was not cool or appealing like Crash Bandicoot and not revolutionary with its gameplay like Super Mario 64, other mascot platformer attempts like Bug and Clockwork Knight also flopped for similar reasons
>Sonic the Hedgehog was utterly-shafted and never got a proper mainline game on Saturn.
>Panzer Dragoon Saga was too little, too late coming out after everyone else bought a PSX for FFVII.
>Saturn ports of PSX games or 3D multiplats were notorious for poor performance and muddy visuals because of the quad rendering tech.
>High quality 2D fighting games were largely stuck as Japan exclusives because their required RAM cart peripheral never got an official US release.
Huge marketing budget. And the western gaming press hyped the playstation hard from the start. The actual console was rather cheap and disappointing.
The PS1 was the natural successor to the SNES with similar games for a new generation.
Look at classics like MGS, FF7, SotN, and Crash that play very similar to what people were used to on the 16 bit machine, but added a fresh coat of paint on top. (more frames of animation, use of polygons, etc)
This was very attractive to most people.
>Sony showcasing the console everywhere (for the common public) from early years 1995/1996
>Sony slashing the price of the console in 1996 and 1997
>Easy for devs. By 1997 the catalogue was decent, by 1998 and 1999 It was glorious.
>Modchip
Jack of all trades console at a decent price.
Same thing that makes any console a success, support of Japanese developers.
PS1 sold more units than N64, Dreamcast, Xbox and GameCube combined
also PSone sold more units than xbox, dreamcast, ngage and dreamcast
A whole bunch of different things
>Sony's image was synonymous with quality, as they were seen as one of, if not the best producers of TVs and electronic peripherals
>Sony had a much larger bank to pull from and a much better marketing machine than Nintendo did, they even used to include PS1 advertisements on cards inside TV boxes they sold
>CDs rapidly outpaced cartridge space developments and could use several gigabytes (albeit over multiple CDs), meaning space limitations were a thing of the past
>Development kits were semi-convoluted given how many quirks the Emotion Engine had, but eventually became very well understood and developed relative to the N64 which had more limitations
>The "black spine" look and overall aesthetic of the PS1 made it look far more mature than the N64, which was marketed more heavily to younger audiences whereas adults and teenagers could play gory, mature titles like Nightmare Creatures, Resident Evil, etc. while still having family friendlier options on the side
>Average cost of a PS1 game was anywhere from $30 - $50, whereas N64 games were usually priced at $50 - $70 (N64 also cost $30 or more than the PS1 on average)
It can't be overstated just how hard the N64 flopped in the late '90s, Nintendo had next to zero market share outside of future Youtuber Nintentoddlers who would then go on to insist that Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, or OoT were somehow better than the entire PS1 library.
Entire library these 3 gaems not enuff even shenmue must kneel.
kits were semi-convoluted given how many quirks the Emotion Engine had
That's the PS2 anon.
>Nintentoddlers who would then go on to insist that Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, or OoT were somehow better than the entire PS1 library.
Must be true if they keep getting brought up unwarranted like that.
That makes no sense, but go off nintendrone, tow the line.
>That makes no sense
What doesn't? You brought up some N64 games in a disparaging manner even if there was nothing OP said to provoke such a feeling.
>nintendrone
>implying
Console/Computer warriors are shitheaps in general. Especially those still warring over long obsolete hardware
I didn't, I'm not that other anon. But if you're on /vr/ it gets brought up in almost every Nintendo thread. The other day anon posted that super Metroid was the largest scoped game to come out at the time and then he moved the goalpost and acted like a child when he was proven wrong. It happens all the time. You sound like a nintendrone, I calls em likes I sees em.
>You sound like a nintendrone
Nah. Haven't even touched a Nintendo in a long time. I even get the retroactive backlash against the N64 in here to some degree. I just want a comfy flamewar free PS1 thread, mang.
That's ok, it's all good. But, it's impossible to have a thread like that without some sort of console war posting. This has been a pretty good thread so far
Yeah.
Anyways, I'm considering netting a modchip for mine. At least for the stuff fetching high prices these days (Klonoa, Valkyrie Profile etc.)
I modded mine with a mm3 and it's perfect. Got a few CD cases filled with bootlegs and it's a done deal.
>it's impossible to have a thread like that without some sort of console war
Only because console warrior homosexuals exist.
Sony was like a modern Apple, they had money for keeping low prices for consoles, also the opened a door for less skilled devs. When you can achieve something on Saturn only with assembler, psx used C mainly. Also CD rom, cartridges cost significantly more, so you could get more profits with Sony.
The hardware was awful but good enough to alure customers with the "real 3d"
Soul and $299
1. cheap plentiful games. Every month was a flood
2. allowing shoveware gave every small dev on earth a shot at releasing on a major console
3. the CD format was significantly cheaper than cartridge, which made it significantly more profitable than cartridge
4. "king-maker" games like Tomb Raider, Madden, GT2, and Final Fantasy solidified high console sales
Sony, idc if they weren't in the videogame market, sony was the shit. Everybody who was cool had a walkman or discman in the late 90s. Sony TVs were superior, Sony sound systems were usually superior (sansui ftw), Sony radios, Sony cameras, etc... they were considered high quality products. Things were different back then, if you were poor you had to save money or you just didnt bother buying new tech and waited for it to be affordable. Nowadays people who can't pay rent are buying 1200 dollar iPhones and shit. The brand quality isn't even important anymore, it's just the brand name and if you can be homeless with a new iPhone, then there is no standard for delivery anymore. There will never be another big name in the console market, because there are no more big names left that would excel in such endeavors, unless apple decides to make a handheld.
>PAL
into the trash it goes
Better covers than NTSCU.
Piracy
It being a cd player alone was good enough for some people. The games were a bonus.
Dark/interesting games like in your pic. The ps1 was fricking mystical at the time for a bong lad.
Piracy opens the door it wasn’t what 2 games for Christmas it was like Friday movie night every week with a modded ps1
They were the first to primarily focus on 3D games and the limitations of the PS1 forced talented devs tot find creative work arounds.