The PS3's worst enemy

Short and simple. In my opinion, PS2 is the greatest console of all time. Well, it has the greatest game library at least.

Josh, the Wii is not proven technology yet and if $360 is not a low price. ($250 + $60 for extra controller and attachment + about $50 for another game like Zelda because you know you will get another game.)

A lot of those people that are buying the PS2 now will be buying a PS3 three to four years from now.

I do believe that Sony could live on quite successfully on the PS2 for a year or more, at least until the price of PS3 technology and development costs for PS3 games drop.

i'm getting a SNES this Xmas. can't beat the price and the large catalogue of top-notch classics.

"PS2 is the greatest console of all time"

yay! it was mine too last week!
this week is the SNES. i'm feeling nostalgic...

Sony's strategy is simple and seems to be working judging by these replies.

Support the PS2 ensuring a constant revenue stream whilst at the same time release the PS3 at a premium price. So early adopters, hardcore fans, techno'heads and those with plenty of money will snap up the launch units. Casual gamers and those on a budget will buy PS2's based on the cheap price and enormous choice of games. Sales of PS2 software will continue to be massive while at the same time the PS3's user base will steadily increase.. as PS2 sales drop off after another year or so the PS3 price will be reduced to entice more people to upgrade.

I believe when KK say's he's not bothered about MS or Nintendo he actually means it, Sony are hoping that Playstation owners will stay with the brand and upgrade to PS3 when they can afford to and in the meantime continue to buy PS2's.

Time will tell if their plan succeeds.

"The only consoles that have never had issues like this are from Nintendo."

Well, aside from the melting Famicom chips (which others have mentioned and hit about 10% of first-run systems, if my memory serves), there have been some technical issues that long-time Nintendo owners would recognize.

The most famous of this is corrosion on the contacts inside the front-loading NES, which resulted in the now-famous Nintendo CPR maneuver and all its variants (I liked hitting mine lightly around the molded grill on the top, some liked using their shirt as a filter, and so on).

Then on some people's NESes, the spring loading mechanism would fail, and the cartridge would only stay down if you forced the slot and held it in place. This didn't happen to me, but I had friends with the problem. Fortunately, another NES cartridge was just the right size to jam the slot in the right position.

Also, the original Game Boy (and the Game Boy Pocket, which was just the same hardware built smaller) had a regular problem of having an entire line of pixels die. Thus, you'd have a blank line in the middle of your game. This is one of the reasons I only played RPGs on my ol' brick - I could compensate for a line here or there in an RPG, but not on other genres.

This wasn't made into a huge deal due to the lack of games that bothered with it, but it was sometimes a pain to get the contacts connected properly on the N64 memory card in the slot in the controller.

Except for the last one, those are all consequences of aging hardware, just like PS2's disc read errors.

Now, for the contention of the piece itself - would the PS2 hurt PS3 sales?

One thing that many around here lose track of is that the hardcore gamer contingent is not a majority, or possibly even a plurality, of video game console purchases. Now, the video gamer is not about to pass up the PS3 just to get a PS2 - especially since a majority of us already do own one (or more than one).

And the post has a very good point. Non-gamers looking at a video game console are much more likely to decide on the PS2, which is vastly cheaper and has a huge library, over the PS3.

The Xbox 360 is actually not worrying about the Xbox Anchor for a couple reasons. One is Microsoft's insistence on keeping the Anchor at its current price point. Pricewise, it's only a small step up from the Anchor to the 360 (core version anyway), so it's much easier to talk yourself into it.

Plus, Microsoft has sold the public at large on the idea that the 360 is completely backwards compatible. It's not, but we're talking marketing and not technology here.

This is the reason the core 360 exists - to tempt people into buying the 360 instead of the first iteration. Microsoft could have marketed the two versions as "Gamer version" and "Non-gamer version" for all practical purposes.

@ 33
Pirate, how can you have a blog site called SoftwarePirate, even calling yourself "Pirate" and then "claim" not to condone pirating software (Even though you say you don't condone it, that's not exactly the same as saying you actually don't pirate software. You say that it's just a play on words as to the reason why you chose the name "SoftwarePirate" so my question to you is why did you pick that name in the first place? Was it just to sound cool? "Hey Software Pirate here, or just 'Pirate' for short but heh, no I believe in pirating software. I just like to sound or look like one. That's teh cool!!11".

Come one man, stop posing and get real. Ether you pirate apps or you don't. Regardless of what you believe. If you don't then you might as well just call you're self "Vanilla the Ice pirate" cause that's the kinda game your playing.

Oh and if you're wondering I'm a true blue console chipping, appOS burnin', ROM downloadn' MP3 file grabbing pirate!
ArrG!

Correction, "Hey Software Pirate here, or just 'Pirate' for short but heh, no I DON'T believe in pirating software. I just like to sound or look like one. That's teh cool!!11"...

@60/61 PiratePete

"Software Pirate" is a play on words (notice the pirate hat and the jolly roger logo?), and for pretty obvious legal reasons I don't condone pirating. I want to be legitimate, and it's hard to be legitimate (or to stay away from lawsuits) if you just become a comment sheet for a BT tracker. I kind of thought the premise was pretty clever.

That said, I did indeed mod my PS2 (disc hole to the flip-top for use with Swap Magic 3) to play import games. Take with that what you will.