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Forums - Sales - Time To Put The PS2 DVD Myth To Rest

thismeintiel on 26 June 2017
BraLoD said:
Even with massive pirating the thing sold over 1.5B games officially, it's pretty clear what it was bought for, and for example just here is Brazil most likely more people played God of War than what it is said to have sold officially in the entire world, plus the countless football hacks as well.
All my friends had a PS2 and I can't remember a single time I saw someone using it as a dvs player instead of a console.

Considering its predecessor as a new brand in the market outclassed any kind of comptetition from the until then strong brands it's a no brainer with such a decently priced system with access to a humongous amounts of games and easily piratable/hackable was going to be an even bigger such.
PS2 sold tons because it allowed tons of people to become gamers, that's about it.

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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Vinther1991 on 26 June 2017

It was certainly one of the reasons I bought it, and I know a lot of people who felt the same. It's just easier to invest in a game console when it can also play your movies.
No "myth" there



super_etecoon on 26 June 2017

I worked in a video store at the time. This is not a myth. It's not about the PS2 being a cheap DVD player...that's not true and was never the assumption. It's the fact that the PS2 was a game console AND a DVD player. The combination of those two items in one system made buying a PS2 a consumer savvy decision. Consumer savvy decisions always help a market excel. In a capitalistic society we're trained to scope out major oppportunities for savings and this combination was like the holy grail for entertainment technology.

Again...you main problem with your thesis is that you state that the PS2 was a "cheap" DVD player and that was never a claim which makes this thread a strawman argument.



NATO on 26 June 2017

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



thismeintiel on 26 June 2017
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.

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.

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. 



 

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Zekkyou on 26 June 2017

It's hardly a myth to claim the PS2 coming with a competitively priced DVD player built in will have helped fuel its success, but i don't see why that would be a negative. The average PS2 owner still bought just as many games as owners of its competitors, so as a strategy for getting people through the door it was effective.



irstupid on 26 June 2017
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

This, plus just look at teh PS3.

Sony fully knew the PS2 had extra help due to the DVD. They hoped for the same success with the Blu Ray.



TruckOSaurus on 26 June 2017
thismeintiel said:
TruckOSaurus said:
The DVD player did help sell the PS2 but I agree that the period where the PS2 was seen as a reasonable purchase for someone wanting a good quality DVD player vs standalone DVD players was very short.

As for my personal experience, I bought the PS2 at launch and for the first year, it did serve more as a DVD player than a game console. Back then, there used to be only one or two copies of movies on DVD at the video rental store and they were never rented out because so few people had DVD players. I loved going in and being able to get all the new releases without the fear of all copies being gone.

Personally, I would say that period was practically non-existent.  I mean, for the poorer among us, $139 for the normal price at Wal-Mart, and $99 during Black Friday, would have been the way to go.  For the middle class who had little to no interest in gaming and wanted to spend a little more, a $200 player would have done nicely.  According to this site, ~$200 was the actual average price of a DVD player in 2000.  And for the videophiles, there is no way they would have purchased the PS2 for its "2nd rate" DVD player and features.  They would have gone for a standalone $299-$399 unit, instead.

As for your 2nd paragraph, that's what happens with most systems.  Hell, I watch Youtube, Netflix, and Blurays more than I game on my PS4.  But, I didn't buy it for those features.  Like I said before, those are just icing on the cake.  Things you do while not gaming.  If you had to buy a $50 player to do those same things, it wouldn't really change your gaming purchase.  Just like the PS3 would have done the same even if it launched with Netflix out of the gate, but 360 didn't have it all gen.  And I'm pretty sure the XBO had more streaming apps at launch than the PS4.  Might still have more.  But, no one is choosing a system for those things. 

I don't remember DVD players being this low when I got my PS2. They were considered a luxury item back then because they were so expensive. I don't think you can write off the possibility of people buying the console only for the DVD playback but it must have been a very limited amount of buyers that didn't game at all on it. 

But to early adopters like me, the DVD player certainly helped "justify" my purchase because at launch there wasn't much to play on PS2 (thank God for Tekken Tag Tournament).



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Soundwave on 26 June 2017

I got my first DVD player (a Toshiba brand one) for about $200 in fall of 2000 when The Matrix came out, but it was on sale. 

That said if DVD was such a sales driver, why didn't it help the XBox in the same way (it was easy to give it DVD capability) or why didn't the Panasonic DVD GameCube system in Japan do great numbers?



foodfather on 26 June 2017

Yeah no.
The ps2 was my first console. I mainly got it for dvds as did many other people I know. Of course it had games too ( that I didn't care for). When another dvd player came out which actually had games I thought looked good ( Halo and Splinter Cell) I picked it up.

And even then I still used it as a dvd player until around 2004 when I really started to play games.

As for the PS3 bluray argument, blurays were ridiculously overpriced and not as in demand as dvds.