Sony's wild ride into the 7th generation
At E3 1995 Sony unveiled their first foray into the console market with the PlayStation. Sony Computer Entertainment's President of America, Steve Race, was asked to come up to the microphone for a brief announcement. "299" were the only words he spoke before departing the stage in an atmosphere of cheers and applause from the audience who knew what it meant. At the time Sony clearly understood how important price would be at being competitive in the console market. Something which they chose to intentionally ignore at their peril when it came to the PlayStation 3.
The PlayStation was a success and the PlayStation 2 was an even bigger success with over 150 million units sold worldwide. So when it was time for the next generation console, pressure internally and externally was huge. Just what would Sony deliver?
The landscape was changing. HD TVs were beginning to be introduced but not ubiquitous amongst all homes, Online connectivity which was supported but underused on the PlayStation 2 and would clearly have to be a bigger part of the next generation and the player base of these consoles was no longer just children and teens but was expanding into adults of all ages too.
Many people like to point to the huge numbers of PlayStation 2 sales and attribute a large portion of them to the addition of the in-built DVD player. There might be some merit to that and perhaps it was something Sony thought too. As Sony slowly unveiled pieces of the PlayStation 3 it was clear that they were being very ambitious. Their next console would not simply be the next generation of gaming. It would be the center of your entire home entertainment system. Movies, Streaming, Music, Photos and I guess Gaming if you were into it. Early prototype images even showed the console having 2 HDMI ports. One for your television and another, presumably, for your home cinema projector. This was eventually dropped before release.
Following on from the DVD on the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3 would ship with a Blu-Ray drive, not only for those new movies but also for the games. This may have also been Sony trying to "win" the HD format wars with their Blu-Ray specification vs a rival HD-DVD. The list of compatible media types that the PlayStation 3 can accommodate is staggering. Tons of different file types and some exotic CD and DVD variants too like SACD (Again, this is Sony's format but they eventually dropped this too).
Upon launch there were 2 models available, a feature filled 60B model and a slimmed down 20GB model with less features. The 60GB model had a number of exclusive features, some notable ones
- Native PlayStation 2 support (Meaning there was literally most of a PlayStation 2 inside the machine, it was not being emulated)
- 4 USB ports
- An SD card slot and a Sony Memory Stick slot (Which the PSP also used) as well as a slot for a pretty dead format called CF.
Don't Forget About the Games
But we must not forget this was still a gaming console after all and you cannot talk about the PlayStation 3 without talking about its infamous Cell Architecture. We will save a deep dive into this for another issue but essentially this was a radically different CPU design compared to its rival Xbox 360 and other gaming consoles and computers of the time, and whilst it boasted huge numbers of parallel computations early developers found it incredibly hard to work with. This meant it was difficult for developers to create titles that worked flawlessly on both systems and with Xbox 360 already having nearly a years headstart in sales it would be hard for many developers to prioritize the PlayStation 3's development and of course a gaming console is really only as good as the games that come out for it. This is a lesson Sony would learn for the coming generations and make exclusivity a huge deal.
Only 10 years after the landmark "299" moment at E3 2005 Sony would properly unveil the PlayStation 3 in an impressive near 2 hour long conference. With the final price reveal of $499 for the 20GB model and $599 for the 60GB model. They had come a long way since that PlayStation 1 day and placed a lot of faith in getting the message across that this would be worth it to have all of your home media in one machine.
I think there is a lot of confusion when people look back. People will tell you that Sony lost because the PlayStation 3 was too expensive and whilst they are sort of right, it's only expensive if you are comparing it solely on the ability to play games. They were providing a very good system if you include all the capabilities. This was a tactical decision from Sony and they were losing a lot of money per console to keep the cost to the consumer down. This can be standard practice in the console market, knowing that you get the money back in software sales later and typically the consoles get cheaper and cheaper to produce over time especially with the later revisions and slim models and such but I think the PlayStation 3 pushed this strategy to its limit.
The initial sales after launch were slow, machines were not flying off the shelves but Sony invested in the infrastructure, kept refining the design and features over multiple different revisions and decent exclusive games did start to come out. Sales steadily grew ever since and I suspect the addition of the Blu-Ray player did start to play a role in this, just as the DVD had done for the PlayStation 2, as the adoption of HD TVs also grew. Eventually the PlayStation 3 did outsell it's rival the Xbox 360 but not by much.
It's hard to work out whether Sony's home media centric vision was a good idea or not. Those crazy features are part of what makes the console so great to me and I am really glad they were in there. Sony eventually worked out that gaming should be the primary focus for their PlayStations and that seemed to serve them well in the PlayStation 4 and 5 era with those machines getting off to a much stronger start. The launch of the PlayStation 3 happened during a really fascinating era with so many new technologies starting that we now just take for granted and they certainly took the console in a fascinating new direction.