Now, you're just making things up.  GE, Samsung, and even Sony, had cheaper players available, as in $149-$199.  They were even cheaper on Black Friday.  They are far from shitty brands.  The only no name brand player I linked was $18 in 2004.  But, even the good brands had ones less than $50 the year prior. 

I decided to make this thread because I have noticed a myth being thrown out there as fact on a few threads.  Mainly those talking about the PS2's sales compared to the PS4's.

The myth goes like this...When the PS2 launched in late 2000 WW, it was around the same price as a cheap DVD player, so many just picked it up to have the benefits of a DVD player, that they might decide to occassionally play games on.  It's mainly used as a way to either explain the PS2's success and/or explain why the PS4 can't match the PS2.  There's one big glaring problem with that.  It's a big, fat lie.  Well, at least an ignorance on the subject.

You see, in late 2000, you could pick up a cheap DVD player for around $150, or half the price of a PS2.  Here's a link to a blog where they were looking for the $99 DVD players announced in a Yahoo News article (sadly this is not archived), but only found ones not discounted.  Searching online, they found GE and Zenith models for ~$149, a Samsung for $160, and Walmart had a GE player for $139.  And during the holidays, especially Black Friday, you could pick up one for $99, or 1/3 the price of a PS2.  The site in the first link got a bunch of replies from their readers and wrote another article about the $99 players being available for Black Friday.

This myth gets even sillier the further you look into the PS2's lifetime.  You see DVD players dropped in price quite quickly.  By 2003, they could be bought for under $50.  Keep in mind that this was less than 1/3 the price of the then $179 PS2.  Here is a Black Friday ad from 2004, that advertises a DVD player for under $18.  That's less than 1/8th the price of the then $149 PS2.  This price thing is also silly, as it does not explain why the Xbox, which was the exact same price as the PS2, wasn't also bought as a cheap DVD player.  Are people really going to try and say that a required $30 DVD kit was all that was stopping consumers from buying the Xbox en masse?

There is something else that disproves the DVD player myth.  SW attach ratios.  It's just like how we can prove the PS3 wasn't bought by millions upon millions of for its Bluray player function.  The PS3's SW attach ratio is basically tied with the 360's, which only used a DVD drive.  If there were so many people who bought it for Bluray, the attach ratio would have been MUCH smaller.  Similarly with PS2, its attach ratio would have been much lower if 25M+ of its sales were mainly for DVD use.  Instead it is right there behind the 360 and PS3, with just one less game bought per console, at 10.5:1.  And it's attach ratio is also very similar to the Xbox's.

So, I think it is time to put this ridiculous myth to rest.  It's obvious the PS2 sold so well because it had 3 things most PS systems have.  Great price.  Great 1st party support.  Great 3rd party support.  It's the same reason the PS4 is doing so well.  Granted, I don't think the PS4 will match the PS2, but 100M+ is pretty much guaranteed.  Thoughts?

Yeah no.
The ps2 was my first console. I mainly got it for dvds as did many other people I know. Of course it had games too ( that I didn't care for). When another dvd player came out which actually had games I thought looked good ( Halo and Splinter Cell) I picked it up.

And even then I still used it as a dvd player until around 2004 when I really started to play games.

As for the PS3 bluray argument, blurays were ridiculously overpriced and not as in demand as dvds.

I got my first DVD player (a Toshiba brand one) for about $200 in fall of 2000 when The Matrix came out, but it was on sale. 

That said if DVD was such a sales driver, why didn't it help the XBox in the same way (it was easy to give it DVD capability) or why didn't the Panasonic DVD GameCube system in Japan do great numbers?

Never really thought of this. Good points. As an added thought, perhaps this is why Sony decided against putting in a UHD drive in the PS4 PRO? Perhaps they've noticed the cost doesn't bear any benefits in terms of hardware sales.

To be fair, HDTVs were in less than 10% of U.S. households when the PS3 was announced, according to Nielsen data, and the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD wasn't settled yet. By time Blu-ray won the format war in early 2008, less than a year and a half after the PS3 launched, you could find Blu-ray players for $200 or less, far less than the then-current $400 price of a PS3. The PS3 was no longer the cheapest Blu-ray player. It only had that distinction for a very short time, like only a few months. And even then HDTV wouldn't be in a majority of U.S. homes until 2010. Blu-ray was never going to help the PS3's sales. Not that it would have anyway under any circumstances, because you're absolutely right that features that might increase the overall value of a system don't matter nearly as much as games and pricing. A system's price tag and games library are by far the two most important aspects that determine a system's relative success.

To address the OP, as for the PS2, by time it was released DVD had been out for a while. The price of the players had gone down quite a bit, and you could go to Wal-Mart and buy one for far less than the $300 asking price of a PS2. IIRC, you could find some as cheap as $99 back during the 2000 holiday season. The idea that anybody bought a PS2 primarily for the DVD functionality is totally without basis. People bought it because it was riding high on the wave of the PS1's momentum. PlayStation was a hot commodity, the biggest name in gaming where most of the biggest games could be played. By the end of 2001 it had sold over 7 million units in the U.S., and that's without a price cut. It also beat the GameCube and Xbox to market by a year, at a time when Nintendo's stock with the gaming public had fallen substantially (at least when it came to home consoles) and when nobody really knew much about the upcoming Xbox. Not only was PlayStation a strongly established brand, but the PS2 had a solid library of titles in its first year, the $300 asking price was not too steep (about $422 inflation-adjusted from Oct. 2000 dollars), and it had essentially no real competition in its first year.