Sony PlayStation: Winning Developers to Win the Console War

When Sony entered the console market in 1994, Nintendo and Sega had owned it for years and had no obvious reason to fear a newcomer. Sony won anyway, and not by shipping the most powerful hardware first. Nintendo's expensive cartridges gave it tight control; Sega's developer relations were famously difficult. Sony walked in with a completely different offer aimed not at players but at the studios who made the games, and the consequences rippled outward from there.

For founders and operators building any platform, marketplace, or ecosystem, this case sharpens a sequencing decision that decides who wins: whether to optimize first for end users or for the builders whose work the users actually come for. By the end of the 1990s the scoreboard was lopsided, and one competitor exited hardware entirely. The specific moves Sony made, and the order it made them in, are inside the app.