Who would have won the 5th generation, if Sony hadn't joined the race?

Who would have won the 5th generation, if Sony hadn't joined the race?


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Saturn for sure. Square already had backed out of the N64, and had more port support even with PS in the picture. Only things that carried the N64 it's entire gen was Mario 64 and OoT.
Edit: I'm still too scrubby to be allowed to vote here. :/
 
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Saturn for sure. Square already had backed out of the N64, and had more port support even with PS in the picture. Only things that carried the N64 it's entire gen was Mario 64 and OoT.
Edit: I'm still too scrubby to be allowed to vote here. :/
If Sony hadn't entered, who's to say Square wouldn't have stuck with Nintendo? I'm going N64 here.
 
This is a really interesting scenario. I'm going to say it would have been really close with Nintendo taking the lead due to first party games.
 
My gut says the n64 just because Sega just seemed super determined that gen to keep fucking up. But Nintendo's decision to stick with carts might have pushed things in Sega's favour despite that.

The interesting thing is that the technology that became the n64 was shown to Sega first, but they decided to stick with what eventually became the saturn.I'm also pretty sure there was also discussions of Sega and Sony partnering up as well. In an alternate timeline, the Saturn could have been the n64 but with a disc drive.
 
I loved my Saturn, but with no Sonic game on it, I have a hard time imagining a reality where they could have beat Nintendo, which had twin nukes in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Aside from those obvious nukes, the N64 just had a much stronger library in general.
 
Saturn would have probably gotten more 3rd party support, but far fewer 3D games than PlayStation did.

Yeah I think it would have been closer, probably SNES vs MegaDrive numbers and a few more.

Neither would have gotten close to PlayStation's 100+ million though, Sony did so much to make gaming mainstream that generation.
 
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I loved my Saturn, but with no Sonic game on it, I have a hard time imagining a reality where they could have beat Nintendo, which had twin nukes in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time. Aside from those obvious nukes, the N64 just had a much stronger library in general.
You are comparing two failed platforms as we know them today. But without PSX many famous games could have appeared on Sega Saturn before N64. Imagine Tekken, Ridge Racer and Ace Combat on Saturn! It could have made it a dominating platform!
 
You are comparing two failed platforms as we know them today. But without PSX many famous games could have appeared on Sega Saturn before N64. Imagine Tekken, Ridge Racer and Ace Combat on Saturn! It could have made it a dominating platform!
I can easily imagine all three of those on Saturn and the N64 still winning easily.
 
Man, tough call. I went with Saturn because I think the market at that time really wanted CD-ROM games like Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, FF7, etc. plus sports games, arcade quality racers + fighting games. And something without the "kiddie" stigma of Nintendo.

the real question is where Namco, Psynosis, Squaresoft etc would've put most of their efforts.
 
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Man, tough call. I went with Saturn because I think the market at that time really wanted CD-ROM games
Yes cartridges felt obsolete in comparison to CDs!
It's hard to imagine a cartridge-based console winning the 5th generation,

let alone in this day and age! 😂😂😂
 
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N64, hands down.

Saturn was difficult to develop for and while it had great games, it didn't have a mainline Sonic game when mascots were the most important thing to have.

The other thing is Sega was complete clown shoes as an organization and will likely have more issues than not in running the market (you have to remember that Sega of America was AGAINST the Saturn as a concept!).
 
As much as I love the Saturn, I think Nintendo would have won.

After the Sega CD, 32X, Nomad, etc.. people weren't trusting Sega anymore. And Nintendo had a pretty good momentum carried over from the SNES.

Plus, without Playstation I don't know that third parties would have jumped ship like they did.
 
Maybe Saturn. Because it would've gotten more time and more support. Nintendo was very late and burned a lot of bridges with cartridges which weren't the future.

But it depends if Square and the such would've gone to Sega.

The gaming market would've been smaller though, probably equivalent to Genesis vs SNES. I doubt Sega would find the audience Sony did.
 
Damn good question.

I say the Saturn 🪐 because of FF7, which would've been released on it, instead of the n64
 
But probably later than on the Saturn and who knows how they would have performed on that console if developers had been more focused on it?
Sega Saturn is a disaster, without the PS1, the Saturn would have sold 1.5M until the N64 arrived, then the N64 would destroy it, then in 1998 some company would try to enter the market, probably Microsoft itself. Sega's problems were insoluble.
 
N64 for sure. The Saturn doesn't even have a mainline Sonic game. Super Mario 64 alone would have sold more N64s. 3D was the hot new thing at the time, and the Saturn sucked at that.
 
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Sega didn't market it well
Which is crazy to think about, given how brilliantly Sega marketed the Genesis / Mega Drive.

streets of rage sega GIF
 
N64 would win out with more quality fighting and driving games coming across easing the software droughts. We may have also had the 64dd release properly at least in Japan if 3rd parties had pushed for it.

Saturn would also have had more games and been pushed harder but the Segas own management and loss of consumer confidence would have still been an issue.

Though I think without ps2 Dreamcast would have had a chance to sell 30M plus machines.

The industry would not have reached the popularity it did without Sony though.
 
They would be exclusive to the N64, believe me, Sega was Namco's competitor in the arcade and wouldn't like to give them room inside the Saturn.
Soul Calibur came to Dreamcast but in 1999 the market realities were different.

The only reason SoulCalibur came to Dreamcast was that Namco had an exclusivity deal with Sony that was ending.

They wanted preferential treatment with greater share of game sales from Sony, seems that Sony caved in and got a few more years of exclusivity from Namco.
 
Nintendo, sega fate would be the same with non Sony hardware. Microsoft only joined after they saw Sony PlayStation, they feared Sony could be a potential threat in the Microsoft future. So if Sony hadn't joined I really think only Nintendo would release consoles and gaming in general would be more niche currently it is.
 
Way too many variables to ever truly know, but assuming they kept the same prices with N64 at $200 vs Saturn at $400, I think the N64 would have won out.

I love the Saturn. Might even be my favorite console of that generation in a weird way, but it sometimes lacked the wow power that that the PlayStation and N64 had. It would have impressed more without the PlayStation around though I think it would have made the graphics in games like Mario 64 and Wave Race that much more impressive when they would have come around.

The N64 had built in 4 player, used an analog stick which is much better for 3D games, and had rumble support via a pack.

I think third parties would have still favored a CD based console over cartridge, but the other factors here would probably ultimately win out forcing third parties to support the N64 more than they'd ideally want to.
 
Saturn for sure. Square already had backed out of the N64, and had more port support even with PS in the picture. Only things that carried the N64 it's entire gen was Mario 64 and OoT.
Edit: I'm still too scrubby to be allowed to vote here. :/
I disagree.

I think Square would have just stayed with Nintendo. Japan is the only country who really pulled weight with the Saturn. Sega royally fucked up the Saturn launch at least in NA.
 
The Saturn despite having to rework titles to simulate 3D. With even a fraction of the support that PS1 received it would have been a good investment if the PS1 did not exist.

N64 is an embarrassing piece of obsolete hardware with the worst controller since the Videogame Crash of 1983. A three disc PS1 title would take nearly 7 cartridges. The image would also be smeared on a CRT. Only nod I would give to it is that it does perspective correct texturing unlike PS1's wobbly pixel implementation but that would not give it an edge against the Saturn as it fakes 3D.
 
This is an interesting hypothetical, but all but impossible given the degree that Sony disrupted--nay, obliterated--the videogame industry.

First of all, without Sony, both Sega and Nintendo would have released less powerful consoles. We all know the stories about the original Saturn design, and how Sega was forced to increase the hardware power to compete against PlayStation, at the cost of having a console that was brutally expensive (which is ultimately what killed them). We don't know as many details about Nintendo's original design plans before 1993, but we can clearly see their struggles to release Nintendo 64 while also hitting that crucial mass-market $149 price point. They had to literally strip that motherboard down to the bone, like Matt Damon's rocketship in The Martian. That's why N64 was plagued with those infamous bottlenecks & everything was chugging along at 10 fps.

So without Sony, what would Generation 5 look like? I think it would probably look a lot like the Atari Jaguar. That console was designed along the longstanding technology curve tempered by price. You have to build the most powerful console that can also be sold at $149 without losing money. 3DO was a very powerful beast but launched at $700, and even by 1995, it was selling at $299. Needless to say, it never went anywhere. Atari Corp had a much better balance between price & performance, and if they had a better launch--if they weren't crippled by supply & distribution problems in Christmas 1993, if there was better launch software--things might have turned out very differently. Sega was right to worry about them. The Atari 7800, after all, had outsold the Master System in the US ( a little apples-to-oranges, but still), and the Lynx was an amazingly powerful handheld that was crippled by poor distribution (the Tramiels' notorious business antics had caught up with them).

By 1994, Jaguar had some great videogames: Tempest 2000, Alien Vs Predator, Iron Soldier, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D to a lesser extent. However, by that time, everyone was already buzzing about Sony's PlayStation, and so Atari's crucial moment had probably past (those titles should have arrived the year before). And once gamers got a look at Ridge Racer and Toshinden (ugh), that competition was over. Take all that away, and the future looks very, very different. Games like Iron Soldier, I-War and Battlesphere (released after the Jaguar's retirement) suddenly look a LOT better. It's too bad that Space War 2000 was never completed, I really enjoyed that one very much.

So, in terms of 3D polygon powers, we would expect 5th Gen games along those lines. You'll have one more console generation that refines and perfects 2D videogames with some continued forays into 3D, but nothing that represents a definitive paradigm shift until you get to the 6th Gen. You're certainly not going to see something like Tekken 3 or Fighters Megamix during that era.

Now how would the market react to that timeline? This issue is rarely discussed, and was raised here on NeoGAF, but the US videogame industry went into a steep decline in the mid-90s. From 1993-1996, the industry shrank from $6.5 billion to $2 billion. It only really started to pull out with the launch of Nintendo 64 and the subsequent Sony-Nintendo war in 1997. Without Sony in the picture, does that even turn around? Or does Nintendo completely dominate once again? I suppose it would all depend on what Super Mario 64 looked like, and that would depend on what Nintendo's console would be. Would the CPU be 32-bit or 64-bit? How many other N64 features would be gone? Could such a console run Mario? Are we looking at polygon graphics like the Jaguar, or perhaps those early third-party Saturn games that used only one CPU?

One thing is for certain: the kids were growing tired of the same old videogames. The enormous blockbuster success of Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam masked a very sharp decline in the overall industry, and given how notoriously fickle the gaming public was at the time (just ask Sega), something new was needed. Yet another console cycle of refined 1980s-style 2D games just wasn't going to cut it. The kids were not going to tolerate another five years of Donkey Kong Country clones. Without Sony, where does that new innovation come from? Does it come from PC? Doom was a massive megahit, and Windows 95 showed Microsoft was taking videogames seriously. But they only did so because of Sony, and feared losing the living room which was to be the home of the legendary "set top box," where all the futuristic technology predicted decades earlier would converge. Without PlayStation, does Microsoft stick to the PC, expecting that to become the center of the digital future?

The truth is that's the real reason Sony got into the videogame business. They wanted a foothold in the living room so that they could control that future market, one where you could watch movies, surf the internet, conduct online shopping, download music, yada yada. Sony built the PlayStation so that they could sell DVDs and Blu-Rays. Take away the PlayStation and all of that either moves back several crucial years, or disappears entirely. Who knows? Maybe we'd be watching movies on Super VHS?

Counterfactuals, alternate timelines, it's all but impossible to speculate. Sony's PlayStation was a massively disruptive product that changed videogames and consumer electronics in every conceivable way. It was the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and cleared the path for the new century. And there really wasn't anyone else with the vision to make that happen, not Phillips, not Microsoft, certainly not 3DO. Atari Corp was slowly fading into extinction, Sega was that cult favorite local band that had a couple breakout hits, and Nintendo, well, they'll always be Nintendo. They're never going anywhere. How videogames in the 90s would have looked is anyone's guess, but it almost certainly would have been smaller, weaker and less interesting.
 
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