I think it’s sort of fun to think about. Besides not having popular Microsoft IPs like Halo, what do you think would change? What would the industry be like without the Xbox? How would SEGA influence things? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
-Baleaf
Wasn’t SEGA pretty much dead before Xbox even came out?
Yeah, pretty much, but Sony’s Playstation 2 absolutely crushed the Dreamcast. The DC only sold about 11.5 million units during its lifetime, and it was crippled by piracy. People were distributing games that were copied on CD roms to the extent that Sega removed the ability to read CD roms from the machine. Also, major game developers such as Electronic Arts boycotted the Dreamcast.
Sega discontinued consoles in March 2001; XB launched that November.
I feel like Microsoft’s big contributions were excellent online infrastructure and a willingness to burn absurd amounts of money to loss leader high-end hardware. Online multiplayer barely seems to exist in Japan so without Microsoft essentially solving the problem for everyone, I’d expect those alternative universe consoles would look more like Nintendo’s clunky online infrastructure.
Really, nothing would be different from the perspective of the gamer. Sega products would just fill in the space that Xbox products do. The games would even mostly be the same - hell, there might still be a Halo.
Yeah, Halo was already in development before Bungie was bought by Microsoft.
I think there would be more Japanese style games like turn based RPGs and adventure games. There would likely be fewer P vs. P online shooters.
Halo would still have happened without the Xbox. It was already in development before Microsoft bought Bungie (years before) and it was Microsoft that turned it into an Xbox launch title. It wasn’t developed specifically for the console.
I played Marathon on my Macintosh years before Halo came out, and it was very similar, so Bungie already had their FPS formula down and I’m sure they would have released the game similar to the way it ended up even without the involvement of Microsoft.
Yeah I remember it too. It was pretty ahead of its time - more than just a “Doom clone”, it had a wide variety of creatively designed enemies and weapons. I also think its story - told through text-based exposition in data terminals that you’d access over the course of the game - was probably far more deep than anything else in an FPS or possibly even any game at all, at the time.
A more likely alternate universe is one where Nintendo decided to move forward with the disc-based system that Sony was developing for them. Without the falling out between Sony and Nintendo, Sony would have entered the console market much later if at all.
Sega would have had a better chance in a market where Nintendo was the only other big console in the room because Nintendo has always had a narrower focus, preferring to be the family-friendly company. With no PlayStation to compete with, they might have survived.
Or without Sony innovating the market, the entire thing might have crashed and burned altogether and we’d still be playing our games in arcades and on computers.
Nintendo dropped all their family-friendly rules for developers by 1994. Sega likely gets just as pummeled if the Nintendo PlayStation exists. They possibly get pummeled harder as a Nintendo-based disc system in 1995 gives a lot of developers even more reason not to leave Nintendo’s comfortable ecosystem.
Bwuh? The PlayStation was an interesting machine, but Sony innovated nothing. The system itself was only created due to Nintendo’s desire for a disc system. The controller was a carbon copy of the Super NES one. And the analog sticks were bolted onto the PSX after the N64 made them mandatory for consoles.
In a world without the PSX, the games that symbolize the console would exist regardless on the Nintendo PlayStation or the Saturn or both.
I don’t know about that, the Sony Playstation was an absolute game-changer, easy to develop for hardware, aggressive marketing and a whole slew of games that probably wouldn’t have shown up anywhere else. The Sega Saturn was notoriously difficult to program for and the N64 cartridge based limitations had their own set of problems. I can’t see Sony system sellers like Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy 7 appearing on either of those systems.
Wasn’t the Sega Saturn also originally going to be a 2D focused system and the reason why it was so difficult to program because at the last second they added a 3D graphics system to try to compete with the upcoming PlayStation? If that’s the case, a 2D CD based Saturn vs a 3D cartridge based N64 would have been a real bizarre scenario to look at with just those two duking it out.
I remember playing gore fest games like Killer Instinct on my N64 in the mid-late 90s, they definitely were open to games not for kids.
IIRC, one of the things that Microsoft was on the front lines about was online gaming. They really pushed consoles forward on that. So in a world where MS never really gets into console gaming, we may be leagues behind on online game play on consoles.
edit: What @Palooka said
The Sega Dreamcast had online gaming. It came with a 56k modem standard and there was an optional broadband adapter available. This was before the XBox came out. It wasn’t enough to save Sega, though.
Right, but Xbox came with an integrated ethernet port and while online gaming before was pretty clunky, Xbox Live really simplified the process and made it much easier than what can out before it. Xbox was also the first console with a hard drive (much older consoles had flash memory, but were pretty small) partially in order to download content from Xbox Live.