uhhh...the Playstation 2 in no way offered anything that FORCED those games to be put on it. People give sony all kinds of bogus credit for games third parties made. Newsflash THIRD PARTY IS NOT SONY. Nintendo and Sega are unique in that they not only made consoles, but also had the TALENT to develop games that sold well on those consoles. Sony never had such talent. All ASony ever did was throw money at developers to make games exclusive. Sony never had a passion for gaming like the other companies did. they just saw it as another way to take over a media market. and they pretty much made the two ACTUAL gaming companies almost irrelevant through shady marketing. Luckily Sega and nintendo are very talented strong developers and could design circles around Sonys bunch of talentless hacks. Square is talented developer. Capcom and Konami are talented developers . Sony just makes consoles. And stupidly fragile badly designed ones at that. GTA, FF, all the games that made Ps2 popular could have been done on the other systems and Ill even go as far as to say they would have been far better.
Pro Tip! NINTENDO and SEGA make hardware.
EAD and Sonic Team (Sega has a few more inhouse developers as well, but this is their main one) make the console's games. They are actually seperate companies owned by nintendo and sega respectively and have close ties. Believe it or not, SONY and MICROSOFT also have in-house developers (Such as the people who made Legend of Dragoon), they are just not as known/don't produce as successful games.
The arguement I was rebutting was that ALL (Generalisation, I assume) games on the playstation consoles were dumbing down gaming and relying on flashy graphics to make sales.
One could argue that, in regards to passion, no games company has a passion for games- even the 'gaming gods' themselves, Nintendo. Sure, the individual people making the games might have (although funnily enough, all the people in the industry I've met pretty much don't play games, except for the odd bout of World of Warcraft), but as a whole, the company has to have one passion; profit. It's the point of ANY business. After all, What's the point of all this passion and dedication if you don't have the money to pay for not only making the game, but making sure your game stands out in the marketplace due to advertising? I hate to break it to you, but after studying the games industry in a prior university course I did, games developers aren't the fantastical candy-factories you're giving the impression you believe they are.
As for the issue of whether third party developers would have done those games better on other consoles, I'd say probably not. As you said, Sony throws money at 3rd party developers to sell their consoles for them (I agree with you there) think; sony are a rich company- not as rich as microsoft, but richer than nintendo by far (don't quote me on this though, I'm not aware of exact statistics). If sony hadn't of stepped in, those companies wouldn't have had the million dollar budgets they do have to spend on hiring the best people for the job and extending development time to ensure a more polished game at the end, and thus, the quality of the game arguably would be poorer (regardless of the console's power)
In fact, I'd be willing to say that if Sony hadn't stepped in and upped the anti in the games development world (in terms of budget, marketing, and production), the gaming industry wouldn't have progressed as far (due to other companies not needing to compete with sony) and perhaps (this is purely speculation) the games industry would have become a LOT slower in development as a whole.
TK, There are probably a lot of reasons that your friends don't own consoles other than the PS2; the general opinion of people your age is that Nintendo is for children (Definitely not the case), The Xbox was very expensive when it was launched (plus it was marketed generally to an older audience), and they probably hadn't had much experience with games before they got it (or the PS1, if they had one). When I got my PS2 (a year after getting my Gamecube, mind you), I was AMAZED at the STUPIDLY LARGE amounts of CHEAP GAMES! *lol* I went o na budget-game-spending-spree, mainly because gamecube games never fall under $70AU :S so there's that to take into account.
But then again, I don't know your friends so I can't say, but there are a lot of reasons that could explain it.
And please, don't take any offense to this; I know it is off topic (and that you've asked to stop discussing it) but in case you havn't noticed, it IS a topic that I am very passionate about (the games industry as a whole) and I'm actually enjoying a semi-intelligent debate (read: not arguement) about it!
BACK ON TOPIC (Yeah, sorry for straying there but like I said, I love the topic), I would've been surprised if NiGHTS didn't come out on the wii, considering AirNiGHTS had a very similar style of controller planned to ship with it. Any information on this? *Looks at TRiPPY and DiGi*