Sony confirms PS2 has sold over 160 million

[Shadow1980]

CaptainExplosion said:

Still a glorified DVD player.

I really wish this meme would die. By late 2000, standalone DVD players could be purchased for far less than the $300 asking price for a PS2. To repeat what I said months ago on this subject, that's and old argument, and it never made sense to me. Sure, the PS2 having DVD playback right out of the box may have swayed a lot of gamers (the Xbox required an additional accessory for DVD playback, while the Dreamcast and GameCube had no DVD playback at all), which increased its value proposition for those in the market for a Gen 6 console, but I doubt many non-gamers would have bothered.

While I'm not sure about the pricing situation in other countries, when the PS2 debuted in the U.S. in Oct. 2000, it cost $300. By that point, DVD players had been around for a bit over three years (I already owned one before the PS2 released). They had already become affordable, and you could already buy one for half the price of the PS2. By time the PS2's price was cut to $200 (May 2002), you could buy a DVD player for well under $100. At no point during the PS2's life was it the cheapest option for watching DVDs. Further complicating things was that even though it was the only console that could play DVDs straight out of the box, it did not come with a remote control, which would further add another $20 to the cost.

The idea that the PS2 was purchased in large quantities non-gamers just to be a DVD player is just illogical. It was neither the cheapest nor most convenient option for watching DVDs. Regular DVD players did the job just as good if not better and could be purchased for far less money. Unless there's actual market research showing that non-gamers bought the PS2 en masse just for the DVD playback, then I don't buy that claim. The PS2 was following the momentum of the PS1, its sales curve is normal for a game console, and its attach rate is about what you'd expect from a PlayStation console.

Also, why even put these asterisks next the sales of all these systems in the first place? So what if there were caveats? Lots of systems have caveats. Many households bought multiple units of handhelds so each of their kids (or kids & gaming adults) could have one of their own. The 360 had the RROD issue in its first several years. The Wii actually was bought by a fair amount of non-gamers. The PS3 actually was the most affordable Blu-ray player by far back in 2006. The Switch got a boost from COVID. So even if it is true that the PS2's sales were inflated because of DVD, so what? Either one system sells more than another or it doesn't. It should be a matter of academic curiosity, not part of a partisan pissing contest.

bdbdbd said:

Actually, quite a few people did buy PS2 as a DVD-player at the beginning, I had few co-workers back in the day who did just that, but what made the DVD a huge selling point for PS2, was that it actually was a cheap DVD-player for the kids room. You had this one device your kids could play games and watch DVD with. It reached pretty quickly a critical mass which lead to all the games coming on the system. 

Today we have smart TV's and Chromecasts, so the media player functionalities aren't important as they were 20 years ago. 

Not sure if you'll see this since the thread got locked, but...

Decades-old anecdotes are fine and all, but they aren't a substitute for real data. For example, I didn't know anybody who bought a PS2 instead of a standalone DVD player just to watch DVDs. The people I knew that had a PS2 had one to play video games, while pretty much everybody that watched DVDs did so using a standalone player. That no more proves my point than your anecdote proves yours.

And like I said, the PS2 wasn't a cheap DVD player upon release. It cost $300. Even by late 2000, you could buy a standalone DVD player for half that. If someone was only interested in DVD playback, there were always cheaper and more convenient options throughout the PS2's lifespan. It did add to the value of the PS2 as a console as it was the only one in its generation that could play DVDs out of the box with no accessories required. But in the PS2's early lifespan, that added value was only in comparison to the Dreamcast, which was the PS2 only competition until the GC & Xbox released in Nov. 2001. By time those systems were released, the PS2 was already selling so strongly that those other systems could barely compete. Its software was tearing up the charts. It was the console to have at the time.

The claim that large numbers of people only bought the PS2 just to have a DVD not only doesn't make any sense, but it also presumes that the PS2 would have sold significantly less without DVD. The PS2's sales in its early years were consistent with a system simply carrying on with the momentum of its predecessor and having no real competition for a good number of months after its release. Its software tie ratio is consistent with a system bought entirely by gamers.

I suppose it's not impossible a handful of people bought the PS2 as a standalone DVD player, but I have never seen any actual market research that suggests that there was a significant number of people who were looking for a DVD player but were uninterested in games and bought PS2s instead of standalone players.

Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 05 December 2024