this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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They were capable of dramatically different things. Perhaps they also had those contracts, but Genesis couldn't do mode 7, and the sounds that came out of the SNES were dramatically different. There were cases where a game would come out on each system under the same name but developed by two different companies with two completely different designs, because their capabilities were so different.
There were plenty of games that took advantage of one console over the other due to the very different architectures and it was a wonderful and neat thing. That said this is not really the point being made.
It was stated earlier that Sony set "the market rules" when this is untrue. Nintendo in the 80s was incredibly anti-competitive and had a very closed off ecosystem and a tight grip over developers. It wasnt even a matter of whether the game worked on one console vs another it was a matter of nintendo dominating the market and retaliating against 3rd parties that tried to work with other developers. 3rd party exclusives and first and 2nd party devs focusing on one console is somethin thats been baked into the console market since nintendo came into power in the mid 80s.
Nintendo had a problem to solve back then, which was shovelware, so they incentivized fewer, higher-quality releases. Compared to today's market and the means we have to sift through shovelware, it was basically the equivalent of martial law to get the market on track. But for many years, competing consoles were just capable of dramatically different things. That tended to even out in the 6th gen, but even then, many devs would only release on PS2 because it cost too much money to make a game multiplatform, so you'd just target the one with the largest install base. Take a look at the 5th gen for how dramatically different the capabilities were between the Saturn, N64, and PlayStation; two of them were on CDs, one was on cartridges; Saturn sucked at 3D and pushed FMVs; PlayStation had a weird "Z-buffer" problem where vertices were really swimmy and shapes would wobble; N64 lacked the storage space to have many textures at all; draw distance and raw processing power varied wildly; on and on.