Console Mascots
 

Back then, we all remember how big mascots were to sell a console. Why do you guys think video game console mascots today are considered irrelevant? Do you see a resurgence of the genre depending on the audience?

Noticeably for example, Crash Bandicoot used to be the unofficial mascot of Playstation. Why do you suppose Sony couldn't keep him as the face of Playstation?

Edit: I already knew that Sony never owned Crash but why couldn't they buy him out?

Sony can't keep a mascot. Period.

As games pushed toward realism the concept of cartoony animal mascots pretty much faded away. Nintendo is the only one that continued this tradition. Xbox has always had Halo as their main franchise anyway.

Sony still has Ratchet and Clank, but its obvious Nathan Drake is the mascot of Playstation for now.

PS1 = Crash Bandicoot
PS2 = Kratos
PS3 = Nathan Drake
PS4 = ...Nathan Drake?

Because they didn't own him?

God of War didn't come out till 2005, by then the PS2 was already out for 5 years. The Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank franchises were the big new Sony franchises that promoted the console for a long time.

I'm glad Ratchet is still around to this day, he's one of the few animal mascots still left and that's actually still good.

I think mascots aren't really a thing anymore, because the average gamer isn't a child anymore.

And most kids today are playing on tablets/phones with stuff like Minecraft and Angry Birds too. Its actually very disappointing that many kids today aren't growing up playing Mario and Pokemon like we did. I remember GameFreak saying the average Pokemon player is now in their 20's, which makes a lot of sense because it was the original fanbase that grew up into adults.

My father told me I would grow out of video games, one day. I told him people don't do that anymore.

Our parents generation didn't play much videogames beyond arcades in the 70's, so that's probably why most of them didn't stick with videogames as they got older.

It seems most of today's gamers are in their mid 20's to late 30's, because its the 80's and 90's generation grown up and still into games. Now that our generation has taken off, I think the videogames being played by adults will be commonly accepted more than its ever been before.

Back in the 90's videogames were still viewed as kids toys.

You know who I feel bad for is Alex Kidd. He was Sega's number-one guy until they cast him aside for some tudefaced hedgehog.

I'd say it's more due to the industry becoming so big that one brand cannot rely on a sole character. Although the average gamer becoming older might play a part in it as well. I remember still in the Saturn and N64 days seeing Sonic and Mario posters around. later Pokémon, obviously. Fun times.

My parents, being both from the early 50s, never cared about video games at all. By the time they became popular here(1990 or so), they were already too old for them. My mother definitely sees video games as being childish despite knowing that there's games for all ages and that some can be quite violent and gruesome. But she's from such an old generation that she simply cannot grasp why people love games so much. Also, back in the 80s and early 90s, games were sold in toy shops. So that's why people associated them with toys. It's not like nowadays where video games are sold in places where gardening tools, beer, fish and meat are sold.

I'll stop playing them if I happen to not have time for them anymore or the industry takes a REALLY bad turn.

Well the Master System wasn't a huge success outside of what, Brazil? And it also outsold the NES in Europe as whole. It was probably big in some countries. But the Genesis/Mega Drive was way more successful and Sonic is still one of the most well-known video game characters of all time. Also, Sega had this stupid tendency of trying to come up with a "new Sonic" every once in a while. I think that, besides Sonic, the most common Sega characters I saw in advertising back in the Saturn days were the Vritua Fighter and Virtua Cop characters.

Sony wanted a mascot from the beginning, they had that polygon face that went nowhere and hit a homerun with Crash but the problem was is they didn't own him. Sony was not happy they lost Crash and he was going multi-platform, luckily for them that IP crashed and burned, pun intended. They tried making a new mascot with Ratchet&Clank, Sly Cooper and especially Jak and Daxter but that didn't work out too well for them but they kept funding sequels anyway which was good for platformer fans. Personally I only cared for the Sly Cooper series. Sony realized they didn't need a mascot and haven't cared about it since. Kratos and Nathan Drake aren't mascots and are just marketed with the brand like Lara Croft and Solid Snake before them.

Microsoft did try to get a mascot and no it wasn't Master Chief, they had that weird platformer with Blinx the Cat, they tried marketing him and even funded a sequel but it didn't work out and realized they didn't need a mascot around the same time as Sony and Master Chief worked well enough to market the console. Blinx was a horribly designed mascot and the marketing was terrible for it but the game actually had a very interesting mechanic which was later seen a year and a half later in Prince of Persia:Sands of time.

Gex wasn't the 3DO's mascot was he? A lot of people seem to associate the two.

Gex was the unofficial mascot for the 3DO system.
http://videogamecritic.com/3doinfo.htm
However, Gex was actually the mascot for a game company called Crystal Dynamics.
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gex/gex.htm

basically Sony didn't need a mascot to sell millions of hardware worldwide. The name "PlayStation" sold for itself. The PS1 and PS2 having tons of games being the main selling point.