| sega4life said: The piece reminds that the system's success seemed all but impossible at its launch, with a weaker feature set than the PS3 and a for-pay online service. |
Oh wow... you do realize how revisionist this sentence is, right?
First of all, nobody suggested what you're suggesting, because everyone knew that the PS2 did well primarily because of it launched earlier than the other two consoles of that generation. I'm surprised you haven't noticed this but Microsoft looked really hard at that generation and made the awful decision to copy every mistake Sony made hoping that it would result in success. They launched first with flimsier hardware that often broke, they made the hard drive optional, the list goes on. The Xbox 360 is the PS2 of this generation in everything but market share.
Secondly, the PS3 lost about half of the features Sony advertised it as having between the time when it was "revealed" and the time it came out. Look at comparison images between the back of the mock-up and the back of an actual unit.
And third, are you seriously suggesting that people thought Xbox Live was going to hold the console back? Because god damn, where were you during the last generation? Xbox Live was already a success. And maybe you don't remember how disastrous Sonys previous attempt at online functionality was, but plenty of people did, and basically nobody expected them to create a useful service this time around. Nintendo is STILL failing at that.
