Playstation 2 in 2nd place This Gen!

[WilliamWatts]

Reasonable said:

WilliamWatts said:

They probably figured all they had to do was show up to win. So why not take away the format war at the same time? :-p Though in any case I doubt that HD-DVD would have won even if the PS3 had been delayed. Sony's reputation with the PS2 and their own movie studios pretty much sealed that deal.

Agreed.  I think when they decided to put PS3 front and centre against HD DVD they felt they could survive the inevitable initial high price at launch due to brand dominance and that they'd recover any lost momentum via price cuts on the back of production improvements at a later stage.

Instead, of course, the Wii became the real PS2 (saleswise for consoles sold) of the generation and the 360 surprised them by gaining a very stubborn and firm grip on the predominately English speaking markets, particularly US and UK.  I think MS also suprised Sony with the aggresiveness with which they pursued timed and other exclusives.

I suspect the surprise was how effective their early exclusives were in the first two years of the generation and the luck they had. Its a big list of games really and Microsoft came out with all their big guns in the first few years and made some feats which Sony haven't matched to this day -> 10M and 5M selling exclusives, with the latter being new I.P.