Fanboys... ASSEMBLE!

[Weltall]

True but you have to see the growth as well, you're comparing apples to bath tubs. The NES days of the industry was nothing compared to now. Trends were easy to follow and about everyone was on even playing fields. Huge gaming mags didn't start until the 90's, there was no internet and previews and reviews were one in the same in the mags that did exist, like Nintendo Power that started in 88. The Playstation brand brought a long with it the advent of reaching more consumers, getting more players to the table, it was Majora's moon consuming the world and bringing the industry up by turning it against itself.

No, the NES days weren't like 1995, because Nintendo had the market all to itself. Nintendo was able to dictate the terms of videogaming almost entirely. They basically owned everything, and if you wanted to publish a game, you went along with Nintendo's predatory licensing structure. You had basically no alternative but the Sega Master System and the approximately 35 people who owned one.

Sony did not have any such luxury at first because they did something that no other console developer ever managed to pull off successfully--take on both Sega AND Nintendo at the same time. That's why, in those early days, Sony made a number of wise moves: making the console relatively inexpensive, attractive to developers with easy programming and low licensing fees, and aggressive courting of basically everyone out there who wanted to make a video game. This did result in a flood of garbage, but it had to happen. If Sony played by the established rules, they never would have gotten off the ground.

The NES had 794 games for it worldwide and mind you that's a large catalog. As of September 30, 2007, a total of 7,918 were released on the PSX. The PS2 has about 1700 I believe which is still climbing. What i'm saying is that on the NES while you had a large number of games to choose from things never got out of hand. When Playstation hit it sought to devour the world and take the industry down with it by flooding everything so much, it was like there was no point. Confusing or alienating the consumer, or confusing and alienating the developer. Then either the consumers stop buying or the developers stop developing while they all fight for a place on the totem pole, which is exactly why everyone jumped ship when PS3 hit, now it sails like a ghost ship.

The NES had far more that 800 games. I downloaded a torrent that had 9000 ROMs. After culling out all duplicates and most variants/homebrews, I had close to 3000. Considering that the PlayStation ended up selling close to three times as many units as the NES, that's a consistent ratio. And, most of those 3000 games were remarkably terrible games.

You also must factor in that the NES and its games, adjusted for inflation, were much more expensive than the PlayStation and its games. That goes perhaps double for today. Adjusted for inflation, the average new NES game would cost about $90 in today's money. Games are simply much cheaper now than they used to be, which also contributes to the flood. A new PlayStation game usually retailed for $40 in 1996, which would have been about $60 in 1986. PlayStation games were not only much cheaper, but the gamers who grew up asking Mom and Dad for NES games as gifts were now getting old enough to buy their own PlayStation games.

The reason the PS3 stumbled so badly was because of the ridiculously high price tag. Developers saw a $600 medium for their games and understandably balked when the cost of development runs into multi-million dollar figures. It was the same fatal error that killed machines like the 3D0: machines that are too expensive, compared to the competition, will kill all the advantages offered by superior technology. 360s were $300-$400 and the Wii was $250. There's no bigger correlation to sales numbers than console price in most cases.

So I see your argument and why you find it ironic but honestly it's too different eras and that makes it seriously difficult to match up. It's too much of a gap in what the industry was to what it became.

It really isn't that different. The technology is different, yes. Certainly, there are more gamers now than ever before. But, basically, the Wii seems to follow the NES's path to success: Make the console cheap and flood the market with as many games as possible. Of course, the NES competed with nothing until its final years when the Genesis came out and was a superior machine in all regards, technologically.