PS2 was dominant because it had great games, backward compatibility (for awhile) and was also a DVD player. The piracy angle didn't affect sales, despite what Sony says.
You underestimate the impact of piracy in developing countries. It’s true that almost no one bought games at full price, so Sony was only seeing unit sales.
However, once these countries developed further and the people who grew up with PS consoles started to make more money, guess which consoles and games these people decided to buy? Hint: it wasn’t Xbox!
Long story short, easy access to piracy was a gateway to future PS game sales in many developing countries.
That's me. As a kid 15+ years ago, buying a video game for PS2 was ridiculously expensive. I was buying cheaper copies from local "distributors", then I eventually got Internet connection and learned to download them myself. I did buy a PS4 a few years ago and purchased a few games - which does not sound like much, but I basically have 0 time for that now, but if I did have time, it would not be PC, Xbox, it would be PlayStation. If it was just for the exclusive titles. God of War was one of my favorite games and I was happy to play its recent continuation (though I only had the time to finish like 1/3 of the story, I really enjoyed it).
I also bought PS3 before Hotz by the way. Over the span of 2 years I bought like 3 games I cared about the most, that's all I could afford with the money I had available as a kid. After the jailbreak I had some 20 titles.
About 130 of 160 million PS2s were sold in North America, Europe and Japan. Developing countries don't appear to be a significant market for the console.
"developing countries" in that context are places like the former soviet union, i.e. half of Europe at the time, or latin america. The hardware was hella expensive, but with several months of savings it was possible. The games were a different matter. You were basically buying imports from the other end of the continent with all the shipping and customs taxes that incurs. Piracy was what drove people's buying decisions.
This is heavily skewed. If you lived in Eastern Europe it was customary to drive down to Germany to buy PS1/2 because they were much cheaper there. I know several people who started their retail business just by bringing back car loads of PS2's. One guy even got a mocking nickname (something like "playstation") that stuck with him for decades after when he moved on to selling HiFi and AV out of his store.
I absolutely assure you no one, ever, bought original games in those countries. Especially not the (relatively) rich who could afford them.
DVD playback wasn't a selling point. No one had DVDs back then. Everyone watched xvid on their PC. That was the only way to obtain digital movies. DVD stores were very minimal and saw no attention. Rentals were mostly VHS.
Yep, it was the same in the Middle East. Immigrants and travelers to Europe and the US frequently brought back electronics, including game consoles. They were then modchipped locally.
I can echo that sentiment. My original xbox was chipped. As a hacky kid with no money, it was the only way I could play new games. Guess who went on to own every xbox generation for the next 10+ years?
It was also out for so long that it gave it plenty of time to end up used for cheap. It seemed like everyone had one laying around or in the closet at home by the end of its run, usually a slim one honestly.
DVD playback was huge when it came out. DVD players were still expensive so if you wanted one, it barely cost any more to get a DVD player that was also a PlayStation. Between that and PS1 backwards-compat, the PS2 was a bargain.
That's true with the latest consoles too, honestly. They are even better deals in terms of what you get. My Xbox one is nearing 10 years old and it still plays new games, it plays a lot of the older games if they've been ported at least (bone of contention I know it not being proper backwards compatibility), performantly runs all streaming services (can't be said about modern smart TVs), its a blu ray player, I have 5.5 tb of local storage on it, and I got it used for about the price of a modern game.
The same week that Sony launched the PS2 they also launched a 100-disc carousel CD/DVD changer as part of their home theatre kit. There might also have been a 200-disc changer, but I know the shop I worked in stocked one of the 100-disc changers.
Just think! All your CDs and movies in one machine, that you can play on your big rear projection TV over your 5.1 surround speakers!
Just think! They had absolutely no intention of releasing a version that was actually a PS2 with wireless controllers, and indeed thought the very idea that anyone would buy such a thing was laughable.
Not true entirely. Yes all those features helped, but in developing markets, the ability to easily mod chip them to play pirated games was the real seller.
I would rate this as a very low likelihood, because even if someone did come up with a way to pirate single player games (such as Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West), the number of games now that are persistently online-only means that most people will be unwilling to give up that functionality.
Any theoretical PS5 piracy would almost certainly require it to be completely disconnected from the Internet so that the firmware and operating system could not be updated (or verified by Sony).
The reason the PS2 succeeded so massively is that it was an affordable DVD player alone, IIRC at the time you could buy a DVD player for like $199 or a PS2 for $299. It was a no brainer for any family looking to either replace their console or seek to upgrade to DVD - something which was a way bigger deal than the transition from DVD to Blu-Ray.
> something which was a way bigger deal than the transition from DVD to Blu-Ray.
I always find that interesting, because to my eyes the quality jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is the biggest we've ever seen (and likely ever will see) in home video formats, way bigger than the move from VHS to DVD. I don't think DVD has aged particularly well, especially in a world of non-interlaced digital flat panel displays. A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service, but DVD generally looks worse than your typical 480p stream.
Blu-Ray may be a bigger leap in quality, but it's kind of DVD but better. DVD vs VHS gives repeatable high quality video and audio, no adjustment or cleaning, chapter seeking, mailability (which enabled netflix and others to offer a huge rent by mail catalog), durability in a reasonable size. Laserdisc had some or that, but the size was cumbersome and the capacity was too small.
Some DVDs are poorly mastered, and modern encodings are better than mpeg2 at the same bitrate, but 480p DVD should compare well to bandwidth limited 480p streaming.
That is fair. DVD was built to support the same analog video standards as VHS, so there was only so much that could feasibly be done to improve the picture quality. DVDs popularity was all about how much more convenient and feature-rich the experience was.
While there are some terrible masters, a decent one holds it up well; there are plenty of DVDs that play at 16:9 480p cleanly, and a similarly letterboxed VHS might have been 170p with lots of chroma noise.
If S-VHS had ever caught on for commercial releases, then the jump might have been smaller, but a VHS was visibly worse even on screens of the time, and screens were getting bigger pretty fast back then.
Yes, but VHS resolution was not necessarily that great in practice, due to it's analog nature. And, of course, tapes are much larger and you have to rewind them. DVD is much more ergonomic, not even counting extra features, multiple languages, higher quality and more channels of sound, etc.
The difference between blu-ray and dvd was barely perceptible—if at all—on most people's TVs, when they came out, while DVDs were plainly much better than VHS on any non-tiny TV manufactured in the 10+ years before they came out, is part of why DVDs made a bigger splash, I think.
Also, DVDs were fundamentally very different from VHS, while Blu-Ray is just the same thing but incrementally better (yes, I know it's pretty different in a lot of important ways, but it looks very nearly the same, and you use it the same way).
DVDs introduced or normalized:
1) Surround sound on home media.
2) Widescreen picture (widescreen VHS existed, as did pan-n-scan DVD, but DVD popularized home widescreen video sources)
3) "Extras"—sure, you'd see the odd making-of feature on a second tape with some VHS releases, or available separately, but nothing like e.g. commentary tracks.
4) Multiple audio options from one piece of media (original audio plus dubs on foreign media)
5) Nice-looking captioning, potentially in multiple languages, not like ugly VHS/TV CC managed by the TV.
6) No rewinding.
7) Chapters & menus.
8) ... probably more that I'm forgetting about.
Plus they didn't degrade every time you played them (provided you didn't scratch them when handling the disk) and pretty much never self-destructed in the player.
Granted, Laserdisc did some of this too, but it was too expensive and too bulky and ~nobody had one. I'm not even sure more than half the population of the US knew laserdisc existed.
Meanwhile, Blu-Ray brought us... more pixels. And the disks are more durable. A few other features, sure, but only nerds know about those, really. That's about it. The pixel-count increase was big, but it wasn't a whole new thing.
In short: DVD was a new thing; Blu-Ray was "just" better DVD. Consider: almost nobody called a DVD a tape. Tons of people still call Blu-Rays "DVDs".
Whatever the technical merits of Blu-Ray over DVD, it simply didn't make as big a splash. Probably didn't help that streaming services were starting to make non-film-geeks reconsider having a home video library at all, early in Blu-Ray's lifespan.
> A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service,
Heh, especially Netflix. Encoding artifacts everywhere. Every dark scene is a bunch of big squares. Terrible, terrible picture. I can get 2GB(!) h.265 blu-ray rips @ 1080p that look way better than Netflix's 1080p. The problem is they're (streaming services generally, that is) incentivized to make the stream as bad as they possibly can, without driving away too many customers, because storage and data transfer costs are major expenses for them.
> The difference between blu-ray and dvd was barely perceptible—if at all—on most people's TVs, when they came out, while DVDs were plainly much better than VHS on any non-tiny TV manufactured in the 10+ years before they came out, is part of why DVDs made a bigger splash, I think.
This. DVD arrived back in the CRT-era when most screens were both smaller and had lower resolution than modern screens. When Blu-ray hit the market, 32"+ flatscreens had started to become mainstream.
If you try watching a Bluray on a 24" CRT TV then you'd hardly notice the difference when comparing to a high-quality DVD release.
I don't know about that, piracy on the Xbox was a lot easier than the PS2. It wasn't until FreeMcBoot came along around 2007 or 2008 that PS2 piracy really became accessible to the lay person, and that was after the 7th generation of consoles launched.
Well when I look at a sales breakdown by region, the lions share of PS2s were sold in North America (54m), Europe (55m), and Japan (23m). That leaves 27m units divided amongst the rest of the world, notably including South America [1].
I have no doubt that viable piracy improves hardware sales in less fortunate economies, I just don't think it's enough of an effect to have the dramatic impact on global sales that was implied above.
If you want a console whose global sales I think were driven in large part by piracy, look no further than the PSP.
Also I doubt the charts include the most popular way of buying a console in Brazil:
Buying one from USA.
Sometimes even flying to USA, buying the console and flying back is cheaper than buying local.
And during the PS2 era, everyone I knew that owned a PS2, bought it from a shop that sold modchipped PS2 that they bought from smugglers that got it from USA.
Currently I see that with the Switch, of the people I know that own a game console, most of the time is a Switch, and most of the time is a pre-modded Switch imported from USA, usually an old hardware version with Atmosphere installed, because modchipped Switches are buggy.
Every single PS2 I ever saw growing up was bought in the US (I grew up in a third world country). Consoles in big box stores here were outrageously expensive, like 3 to 4 times the price in the US. It was cheaper to fly to the US to buy one I kid you not, so that was what a lot of people did.
edit: Also all of them were modchipped, you could take any console to any random electronics repair shop to get it modded.
a nitpick, North America includes Mexico in those charts and as a mexican I can attest a lot of piracy went on in the PS2 / Xbox consoles back in the day
I don’t think it’s like that anymore. There are many servicies tied to a console nowadays and they solely function as just game machines. If Sony decides to prevent hacked consoles from having a PSN account or even going further into banning those accounts the incentive for piracy is very low.
You’d also potentially lose future system updates making some games unplayable.
In the old days, all you wanted and could do was play games so stakes were low. Now you have Netflix, NFL, and years of digital “goods” tied in there.
I do agree with you that piracy played a big part on PS1, and PS2 success but the role of it in the modern day won’t be as important as in the past.
They don't have any trouble selling consoles right now, and historically they lose money on console sales. Afaik the PS2 was no exception, at least early on in its lifecycle.