Why Did The PS2 Sell So Well?

 

PS2, a twenty-year-old console has turned out to be the most successful of all time. Selling almost one hundred and fifty million units in the past 15 years, it destroyed almost all consoles of its era. It sold over 1.2 billion copies of games that were made for it. Even though PlayStation 3 was released 6 years after that, PS2 games were still going like hotcakes. PS2 ousted Dreamcast and Gamecube from the game although they had some pretty decent hardware. So what made this console so special?

Hardware

Let’s talk about some numbers. The PS2 has a CPU working at 300 MHz with 32 MB RAM. Now comparing this to your current-gen PCs where everything is in Gigabytes, this seems like peanuts. But if we look at the hardware from its time, PS2 was pretty damn good as a console. It had superior hardware than the Sega Dreamcast and had so much potential that almost all the developers wanted to make games for it. While Xbox and Dreamcast had superior hardware, PS2 still sold more units. Back then there were some issues with the play station 2 power supply, but that was fixed in succeeding models.

DVD player

So why would someone buy a PS2 when Dreamcast and Xbox had superior hardware? There was only one good reason and that was the ability of PS2 to play DVDs. Gamecube doesn’t support it and for Xbox, you had to buy a separate adapter to do that. You could use PS2 as a DVD player by default and it cost roughly the same as a standalone DVD player. That is the only reason that PS2 was able to sell a console to non-gamers because people also bought it to just play DVDs.

Exclusives

The PS2 had a lot of great exclusives like the God of War, Final Fantasy and the Shadow of Colossus. The decision to pay a lot to game developers for exclusivity finally paid off and Sony became untouchable. It even had games to rival that of Nintendo’s exclusives. Seems like Sony had it all going in its favour.

Backwards Compatibility

If you remember, PS1 already had a huge fan base when the PS2 came out. But Sony didn’t abandon them. People who owned PS1 titles can play those on PS2 just the same. This directed their entire fan base to their newer console and had a humongous increase in sales.

Gave Boost to Certain Franchise

Sony Playstation 2 also remained popular because it boosted up certain franchises. Remember that Tekken series was never intended to be made for Playstation. But when Tekken 3 came out, it was a huge success on Playstation. The same trend continued on every other Playstation console. Tekken 5 was one of the most popular Tekken games that first came to PS2.

Conclusion

PS2 was an immensely successful console. It had superior hardware to support all the latest gen graphics and had backwards compatibility which allowed playing PS1 titles. Because it could play DVDs, it got a staggering success in sales. Even after 20 years, this console has still a special spot in our memories.

Also Read: PS2 Facts - You Won't Believe Some of These!