Would You Consider Nintendo Switch The Most Commercially Successful Gaming Hardware Of All Time?

[Shadow1980]

To add my two cents to the PS2 DVD playback discussion, the idea that literally tens of millions of people bought a PS2 just to watch DVDs is old argument, and it's one that 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. By late 2000, standalone DVD players could be purchased for far less than the $300 asking price for a PS2.

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 readily 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 just never made sense to me. 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 software tie ratio is about what you'd expect from a PlayStation console.

But even if it was some very large percentage that bought a PS2 just to watch DVDs, 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 and DS were 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 (plus there's the handheld double-dipping factor to consider). 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. Which is what portions of this thread have turned into. Just another front in the platform war, because apparently some grown people can't act like grown people over a toy. And I am going to have to officially insist that people do act like grown-ups in here, because I am willing to accept the OP's request to lock the thread if it gets too far out of hand.