PlayStation Crushed Nintendo and Sega in Europe at Launch—Sony’s Yes Strategy vs Rivals’ Inconsistent Marketing

Quick history check: in the mid-90s, PlayStation didn’t just enter the console race — it lapped Nintendo and Sega in Europe. Fast. And yeah, looking back, the reasons are kind of obvious once you hear how Sony actually ran the thing.

The Europe play that changed the game

Chris Deering, who headed Sony Computer Entertainment Europe when the PlayStation launched, says he saw a gap the size of, well, Europe. Nintendo and Sega were leaning on distributors and didn’t really have a unified plan for marketing or messaging. Sony smelled opportunity outside the U.S. and went all-in on building the brand in every major European market.

"Nintendo and Sega had been using distributors, and they didn’t have a consistent marketing or communications strategy. So, I told [my bosses] I think we can be as big as the US in Europe," Deering told The Game Business.

That translated into infrastructure, not just ad buys. Deering and then-International Finance Officer (and future PlayStation boss) Jim Ryan set up actual Sony offices across the continent — not resellers, not middlemen. We’re talking the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Benelux, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Scandinavia, and more. At the time, nobody else had that kind of on-the-ground footprint in the region, and it mattered.

Local voice, local wins

Sony’s playbook was pretty straightforward: figure out what European players actually wanted, then execute. Ads weren’t copied from U.S. campaigns; they were tailored to British and European audiences using data and feedback. That sounds basic now. In the mid-90s console world, it wasn’t the default.

Inside baseball: make devs’ lives easier

Senior producer Martin Alltimes lays out the other half of the strategy: Sony built developer support in every territory. If you wanted to ship on Nintendo or Sega back then, you were basically flying to Japan and hoping you had someone on the team who spoke Japanese. Sony removed that hurdle.

Alltimes also says Sony didn’t gatekeep content the way others did. There were third-party approvals, sure, but those were mostly about packaging standards and making sure games could pass QA. In terms of what your game was about? They were relatively hands-off. Meanwhile, Nintendo — historically — had a reputation for being strict on NES, SNES, and N64, with lots of rules and restrictions. Frankly, it’s still not the easiest platform to develop for.

The small naming note that says a lot

One last bit of trivia from Sony veteran Shuhei Yoshida: the name ‘PlayStation’ came from Ken Kutaragi riffing on how PCs were called ‘workstations.’ Simple, clean, and honestly perfect for what they were building.

Put it all together — local offices, real localization, developer support that didn’t require a passport, and fewer content roadblocks — and it’s not shocking the PlayStation sprinted ahead. The incumbents were playing the old game; Sony rewrote the rulebook for Europe and won early and big.