BraLoD said:
thismeintiel said:
Yes. I think people are completely confusing an added benefit with the main reason the system sold. I would contend that absolutely no one bought the PS2 as a DVD player. If they did, they are just plain stupid. I mean, at launch all you want a DVD player. You see one on sale for $139-$149 and near it a $299 PS2. No one is picking up the PS2. And in 2003, you are looking at a $49 DVD player or a $179 PS2, and all you want is a DVD player, but you pick up the PS2? Then just a year later, you can pick up a DVD player for $20, but instead get the $149 PS2, again, only looking for a DVD player. No. That never happened. People bought the PS2 for gaming. If they ended up using the DVD function of it a little more than gaming, that doesn't change the reason they bought the system. Like I said, the Xbox should have sold boatloads, too, if that was the case. A $30 DVD kit was hardly the reason people didn't buy it.
And I get that DVDs launched like a year later, in 1998, around the globe when compared to the US and two years after Japan's 1996 launch. However, they still saw the same cost cutting benefits as the ones being sold in Japan and the US, as it was the same companies selling them. And if electronics were more expensive in a certain country, so was the PS2.
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You are being a bit radical, it's very more likely someone bought the PS2 as a DVD player sometime than it never happened.
I can see someone getting on a store to get a dvd and the guy there convincing it to get a PS2 instead. It happens.
Though that doesn't even remotely start to mean it sold considerable more because it was a DVD player, as it was massively supported gamewise and sold accordingly to that, even more as other systems sold very low amounts compared to it also accordingly to their very low amount of games available compared to the PS2.
Dismissing the PS2 ridiculous high gaming appeal because it also could play dvds is simply absurd.
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Well, that was a bit of hyperbole. I'm not really saying it NEVER happened. Just that it must have been rare. I mean some were suggesting it would have only done 125M if it didn't have a DVD player. To me, that is really absurd. So, 30M+ people bought the PS2 to use it as a DVD player? In a land where DVD players were 1/2-1/3 the price at launch, down to 1/6-1/8 the price a few years later, that definitely didn't happen. I would imagine MAYBE it added an extra 1M-2M to its sales, but that would be it.
NATO said:
A month after the PS2 launched, the Sony 530D DVD player was being sold at $320, $20 more than a PS2, and all the 530D could do was play DVD's.
Yes, you could get DVD players for cheaper, but they were, at the time, shitty brands of the day.
A lot of the good brand DVD players still hovered around the $300+ mark, which made the functionality in the PS2 a big selling point for a LOT of people.
You can try to downplay it all you want, DVD functionality was a major draw when the PS2 launched |
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.
