Learning the lessons of the PlayStation 2

March 9th, 2020, 22:37 Posted By: wraggster

This week saw the 20th anniversary of the launch of the PlayStation 2 in Japan -- the beginning of a remarkable era for console gaming.
The PS2 ultimately sold 155 million units worldwide, a record-breaking total that seems unlikely to be rivalled by any other console platform in the near future. Less commonly cited but even more extraordinary in many ways are the software numbers for the platform. Around 1.5 billion units of PS2 software were sold over the years, and though various estimates float around for the number of software titles released on PS2 -- complicated, I suspect, by different ways of counting SKUs and games with different names in various territories -- Wikipedia currently curates a list of almost 4,500 entries.
The 20th anniversary of the PS2 mostly serves to make those of us who were working in the games business at the time feel very old, of course, but it also serves as an opportunity to reflect on how things have changed since the March of 2000. It was an era when consoles ruled the roost; smartphones weren't even a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye at that point, and the PC platform was going through one of the doom-and-gloom points in its cycle, as retailers reduced shelf space for PC games and digital distribution -- awaiting the arrival of Steam some years later -- remained an unfulfilled dream.

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