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Dulfite on 02 April 2021
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IcaroRibeiro said:
Dulfite said:

Yeah for various reasons that people don't consider often enough:

- If PS2 just played games it still would have sold really well, could even have been #1 all time still, but I suspect there were at least 10-20+ million buyers that got it just for DVD players.

- PS2 was cheap to make and buy and weaker than GameCube and Xbox.

- PS3 bombed hard out of the gate due to insane price so PS2 legs were fantastic.

- PS2 getting Wii/PSP ports also helped its legs.

- Launched a year before Xbox/GameCube. Also, Microsoft was new so most of the "hardcore" gamers already had insane loyalty towards PlayStation. They could have released PS2 with barely better visuals than 1 and it still would have outsold the original Xbox.

Switch won't get most of those benefits:

- It has no DVD/Blue Ray drive, nor is streaming heavily featured/advertised for it. People buy Switch's to play games, plain and simple.

- Designing the technology in the Switch to work in such a compact device was probably more expensive to develop than the Wii U and Wii. If I had to guess I'd say this cost more to design and manufacture than most modern Nintendo devices.

- We won't really know for a while how the successor does, so it's too early to tell if Switch 1 will get this benefit.

- Switch doesn't get many PS4/Xbox One ports, and will get considerably less Series X/PS5 ports.

- While it did launch years before the competition launched their next devices, even in 2017 the brand new Switch was considerably weaker than Xbox One and PS4, unlike the PS2 which launched and was much more powerful than N64.

In the end, I will be far more impressed with whatever sales Switch gets than I am with PS2, because it didn't receive non-gaming and coincidental benefits like PS2. Numbers from the hardware part of this site:

PS2 - 157.68

PS3 - 87.41

PS4 - 115.28

PS2 really does stand out, and if those coincidental reasons weren't the cause of it having such high sales, then we should expect to see similar sales of PS3 and PS4, but we don't. PS3 bombed by comparison. PS4, for as loved as the device was and as well as it did, came no where close to PS2 sales.

Console market when PS2 came out was smaller. Economic growth lead consoles being more accessible and affordable. Remember when PS2 was released only one home system ever has surpassed 100 million, PS1, and only one handheld, Game Boy, that needed over 10 years in the market plus a huge upgrade (Game Boy Color) to surpass 100 million too. I'm not sure if Switch surpassing PS2 sales is exactly more or less impressive than PS2 but I'm leaning towards less impressive

Switch pulling something more like 170-180 million copies though... that's another thing

I understand what you are saying, and if they had comparable situations and sold the same, then yeah PS2 would be more impressive because the market was smaller. But PS2 had all these crazy coincidental benefits that PS3, PS4, and so far PS5 do not have, and Switch does not, so their situations aren't comparable. Switch would have to sell 100 million to be less exciting than PS2 sales. I'm personally far more impressed by PS3 and PS4 sales than I am PS2 again because of the benefits PS2 had.