VHS technology to the rescue of game consoles?

Should we draw inspiration from the VHS magnetic video format's victory in the late 1970s to boost current game console sales even further? That's what former Sony Interactive Entertainment America CEO Shawn Layden suggests in an interview with the YouTube channel Pause for Thought, noting that manufacturers rarely exceed 250 million units sold with each generation. Shawn Layden explains, "If you line up all the PS1s, Sega Saturns, and N64s, and look at them by generation, we're hovering around 250 million. The only time we almost reached 300 million was with the Wii. Back then, people thought they could buy Wii Fit and lose weight. So, a non-traditional audience was drawn to the video game industry at that time. But that was an anomaly, and since then, we've kind of stabilized." "We need to break through this ceiling, this barrier." In the 1970s and 80s, two video formats battled it out: JVC's VHS cassette and Sony's Betamax. Despite inferior picture quality, VHS won, largely because it was a more open format, compatible with players from many manufacturers. "People didn't understand this need to have the same machine as their neighbor," Layden continues. "You could have an RCA TV or a Sony TV, and everything was fine. But once your neighbor had chosen VHS and you wanted to watch that cassette, even though you had a Betamax... The industry rallied around VHS." Lesson learned... Subsequently, Sony and Philips created the Audio CD consortium, and then a similar path was taken by DVD and Blu-ray. Understand that the choice was ultimately made of a single technology, a single format, even though several competitors were in the running at each stage. This is what Layden suggests: a video game consortium in which there is a single format, playable on all competing consoles. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo: one for all and all for one? Will the three giants ever agree on total interoperability of games on their respective consoles (Editor's note: Japanese tech companies tried to impose this concept in the early 80s with MSX computers)? Microsoft seems to be heading in that direction, and even Sony has already started converting some of its big titles to PC. But it's hard to imagine Nintendo abandoning its exclusives and accepting such a major upheaval. "If Mario comes to PlayStation, it'll be the apocalypse, won't it?" confirms Layden.