It was all on Sony. Most of the companies that were not Nintendo or Sega and who tried to enter the console market, they either had the price too high like the 3DO or had a almost zero marketing budget along with making little outreach to 3rd party developers [like the CDI and Jaguar]. Sony made not only a very powerful system that was easy to develop for, they put behind it a hundred million dollars iirc just for advertising and made that known, it showed they were serious about entering the console market. They made overtures to 3rd parties like it was do-or-die [and it was pretty much].
There are interviews with Ken Kutaragi and other people, where it is very very clear that while Nintendo was insisting on expensive cartridges, that Ken took advantage and offered lower royalties along with even paying to advertise if it was a top notch game....Like Final Fantasy 7. Sony paid for the US and European marketing for it and it paid off.
Nintendo messed up by sticking with cartridges. They would have been #1 or a close second if they went with CDs. Instead they were a distant second and almost a non player in Japan outside of their own game releases like Zelda. Sega was self destructing on their own thanks to releasing so many add ons that it made customers mad, along with making a extremely hard to program system which pushed away developers...
Sony at worst imo, was going to be taking Sega's spot as the #2 player since they came out so strong and with a good game plan. They ended up with a best case scenario though and just steamrolled the market.
Personally, I was a teen at that time and again, the games that really got word of mouth going at release or around that time, was Twisted Metal / Toshinden / Warhawk / and the DooM port was very good too....Ridge Racer also showed it off and demos of Tekken 1 were being included with magazines [this goes back to Sony's excellent marketing].
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