Console war: History and Key Facts

A console war is the competition between two or more video game console manufacturers. While console manufacturers are generally always trying to outperform other manufacturers in sales, these console wars engage in more direct tactics to compare their offerings directly against their competitors or to disparage the competition in contrast to their own, and thus the marketing efforts have tended to escalate in back-and-forth pushes.

The term became popular to describe competition between Sega and Nintendo during the late 1980s and early 1990s as Sega attempted to break into the United States video game market with its Sega Genesis console. Through a novel marketing approach and improved hardware, Sega had been able to gain a majority of the video game console market by 1991, three years after the Genesis' launch. This caused back and forth competition between the two companies throughout the early 1990s. Nintendo eventually regained its market share and Sega stopped making home console hardware by 2001.

A second major console war was between Sony's line of PlayStation consoles and Microsoft's Xbox consoles, which outside of Nintendo were the only major console manufacturers in the 21st century. This war has been driven by first-party titles developed by the companies' respective internal studios (PlayStation Studios and Xbox Game Studios) and their exclusivity on their respective platforms.

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