bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-05-21, 19:47:
Also I think at the time most people were really focused on whatever gave the best performance (or value) at the time, and weren't very brand loyal. I remember around the early 2000's there were camps of "nVidiots, FanATIcs, and 3dfx Lamers" who roamed the forums, but these people were the minority. Nowadays I think more people pick their favorite tech brands and cheer / self-identify / flame / troll as if they're sports teams...
I agree about brand loyalty wasn't the norm. 3dfx just happened to be first at making an accelerator that worked and have much game support. It could have been easily S3, SiS, Matrox, or ATI instead during the 1998 development window of the opportunity. I could have suggested Nvidia in that list, but we know what happened. But maybe that almost didn't happen. The thing is, Nvidia screwed up really bad with NV1, and the first Riva cards were kind of meh. So even they weren't a certainty. But all those companies made mistakes. There were even others that failed at trying.
Things were changing so fast, and there were so many options, and even then 3d wasn't really a mandatory requirement in playing games, and support was still maturing. It really did turn into about what game was coming out and getting the 3d card for it. You didn't know until it happened. 3dfx messed up because they lost that support war, and fell behind in tech, and mismanaged money. This was still the time when people bought their first 3d card. There couldn't be loyalty because no one could fall back on anyone's history on the 3d market, we only knew the early poor attempts at 3d people wanted to forget about. It's hard to say 3dfx could have garnered tons of loyalty going into 2000, because their primary success was the short lived accelerator add on, and then they faltered very quickly so that there wasn't much time to build loyalty in the brand. Their shortcomings were apparent in 99-00 leading to the decline, and then crash. It wasn't that much of a surprise, except in they were out of money too which caused them to immediately disappear. Today the leaders have had decades to build loyalty into their brand. The popular opinion now of something like 3dfx is nolstagia and wanting to play the games in their native form, of which there are quite a few.
I want to note, since people may point out, my nick is not a nostalgia thing. I created my nick back in 97-98 when I had got my first 3dfx card, primarily to taunt my opponents that I had good frame rates 😀 And it stuck for no good reason at all.