Jim Ryan shared one last thing about PlayStation, that was clearly for the fans.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Ryan revealed in an episode of the Official PlayStation podcast that the PlayStation 2 sold 160 million units. He referred to this as the one thing he remembered the most about the 2000s.
The 2000s were certainly a peak period for Sony’s PlayStation division. The PlayStation 2 built off of Sony’s successes with the original PlayStation in disrupting the video game industry. To add to that, Sony was smartly selling their PlayStation consoles as mass market media consoles, as well as video game consoles.
While the original PlayStation was sold as an audio CD player, the PlayStation 2 was also sold as a DVD player. And that put the PlayStation 2 in the perfect position to cross over as a mainstream movie player when DVD reached its peak as a physical media format in that same decade.
Getting back to video games, PlayStation 2 delivered so many different kinds of games to so many people. It was a perfect meeting point for people who wanted to play games made in Japan, games made in the West, and both. The PlayStation 2 was also where accurate ports of arcade games came together with the growing genre of video games made for consoles.
While some franchises that made the PlayStation a success got dropped, other franchises emerged on the PlayStation 2, and there were also plenty such games that kept going on the console. If you ask someone what game they associate with the console the most, the answer could go anywhere, between God of War, Tekken 5, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Final Fantasy X-2, Guitar Hero 2, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and obviously, we could keep going and going.
Now some fans are going to get caught up on PlayStation 2 being that much farther for the Nintendo Switch to pass as the best-selling console of all time. But that creates a somewhat twisted idea of how the PlayStation 2 got to this number. Years after the PlayStation 3 was released, Sony kept making PlayStation 2 consoles because of the incredibly high demand. From 2000 to 2013, deep into the PlayStation 3’s entire lifespan, and shortly before the release of the PlayStation 4, Sony continued to serve the PlayStation 2 faithful.
But why keep buying PlayStation 2 consoles years after PlayStation 3 games, and also deep in after Steam emerged as a major market for video games? It may be that at this point, consumers were buying it as a cheap, small media player (Later on Sony was only making the Super-Slim models), that just so happens to also play video games as a bonus.
And at that point, it doesn’t really matter to Sony why their consumers kept buying their console. Because of Sony’s multimedia philosophy, they saw it as a success either way.
