Switch Software Sales Are Comfortably Beating The PS2's, The Best-Selling Console Of All Time

It's amazing what an international virus that requires you to stay indoors can do for the videogame industry!... and decent marketing early on.

I still impressed how 3 months selling Animal Crossing suppress 1.5 years selling Smash

Pretty impressive to say the least. The Switch's software library in general gives me some PS2 vibes due to the sheer variety in content that's on display. Hell the Switch has Nocturne, Okami, FFX/X-2 and Katamari Damacy as well as all the PS2 DMC games. All it's really missing for me is some Metal Gear and Silent Hill but you know, Konami.

I would mention that one Atlus game that starts with P that got really popular on the console, but with Nintendo having access to damn near everything else they put out, I'd say let Sony have their fun with it

Different times now compared to then, gaming is far more mainstream.

Makes me wonder what would have happened if Nintendo went to CD with the N64, the PS2 & PSX really relied on 3rd party publishers and they only jumped to Sony after Sega screwed up the Saturn and Nintendo stuck with cartridges.

I don't see it reaching PS2 numbers but I can see it easily surpassing the Wii.

If I had to guess I would say it will end up around 125 million.

@Cheez
The Switch was doing incredible before the virus as well. Sure, it gave sales a boost, but these numbers were coming regardless.

The way I see it, and this suspicion only comes from personal experiences with acquaintances, is that many PS and XBox gamers are only interested in a couple of games, only buying the latest FIFA and CoD each year for example and occasionally adding the title which is big at the time like GTA to their collection. Switch owners, and Nintendo fans in general, seem to buy a much wider variety of games than PS and XBox owners.

@Cheez Yes, the Switch has definitely benefited in some ways, as Animal Crossing and Switch sales have shown.

As the economy worsens or remains steeped in recession (or possibly a depression), one wonders if consumers will be willing or able to pay $500+ for next-gen consoles over the next year.

A $200 Switch lite could be a much more realistic buy for parents. These sales may continue to grow, especially for new adopters of the Switch that have a backlog of great titles to purchase.

Not really sure if this really means much. It could just mean that the PS2 just had a much more varied offering of games for a wider audience while the Switch is more focussed on specific software titles that simply appeal to a lot of its install base.

Either way impressive but I'm not sure if it's really comparable.

@Yosher That, plus the changes of demographics. We had one PS2 for the whole family, and each game cost at least $50, which is $75 in todays money. Now I bought as many Switch games in 2 years as my family's complete PS2 collection.

So it's both that games are cheaper, and that the players are older so they have more money to buy more games.

There is a big difference. The PS2 was also the most pirated console, a large percentage of its owners never had an original game.

The great thing about the PS2 was that it practically had games from almost every genre under the sun, and was back during the time when publishers were actually willing to take risks and fund unique games. Therefore rather than feel like there were certain games and genres you were “expected” to experience if you wanted to have a library of any size, you could literally build a library out of a single genre. Heck, I could have a double digit PS2 library out of purely flightsims.

That all changed when Gen 7 became the era of Sp*nkgarglewee and Gen 8 was enamoured with Jiminy C*ckthroat.

Free digital cookie for anyone who gets that bit.

Now go look at the list of games and compare them.

The PS2 has an unbelievable amount of games.

Nintendo are doing great and the industry should be happy about that.

It proves they really don’t need to do some of the jammy business practices they do (deleting Pikmin 3 On Wii U) and they still need to do something to address drifting joycons.

Having said that they are proving themselves in other areas and showing portability and great selection of games, plus Nintendo’s magical first parties titles are winners (maybe even trumping the appeal of high powered dedicated consoles).

@hadrian I wouldn't say gaming is more mainstream now, however what Nintendo has managed to do in the period since the PS2 era though is pull in the more casual gamer which no other company has effectively been able to do.

Let's also consider the fact that the PS2 was a multimedia machine, a lot of people got it because it was a cheap DVD player. The Switch is doing better, and its only a dedicated game hardware. Like someone said above, the Switch might sale 125 Million units.

And yet we still haven't got a gta game or even a red dead redemption remastered game?

I have 2 of those only. Oddysey and Zelda. I find all the other stuff on the list irrelevant of my taste. Hope to see some new games from Nintendo soon.

I don't think this is as much a comparison of the consoles as it is a validation of the popularity of Nintendo's IPs.

@tonyp1987 Nintendo systems are great for Nintendo game sales. I can understand third parties not flocking to it, if they know that they'll get outsold by the next Let's Go Pokemon Brick & Tile. Even if said third party game offers a way better game. If you're being drowned out by first party games, why even bother?

I don't know why. Maybe people buy Nintendo systems primarily for Nintendo games. I know I do. Because they're usually missing quite a lot of games. But as a result, I don't buy the third party games that make it over to the system, because I'll buy them on other consoles instead.

@Averagewriter Piracy was certainly a thing. Heck, most of my GameBoy games were pirated copies, and people certainly didn't have the equipment to print those at home. I wasn't as prevalent in northern Europe, but in the south and east it was very common. I bought a ton of games from vendors off the street back in the 90s and early 00s.

Those PS2 software numbers makes you wonder what would’ve happened if the Gamecube and/or the Dreamcast came with a DVD-player.

The PS2 seemed to me to have the same problem as the Wii. It shifted a lot of units but the people who bought it often did so they could play GTA, Gran Turismo, Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Once they bought their 1-2 games of choice, they didn't buy any more. I know several people in this boat. I think digital distribution of games has changed that to some degree.

I'm quite surprised the Switch has performed as well as it has during the pandemic. People are indeed stuck indoors with nothing to do, but an awful lot of people have been laid off or otherwise had their income seriously impacted. Maybe there are just more rich folk out there than I'm aware of. Rich being anyone not living paycheck to paycheck 🤣

But the total sales of Playstation 2 software (1,5 billion) it’s difficult to beat.
For anyone interested in numbers, I highly recommend this compilation: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-software-and-hardware-sales-data-from-1983-to-present.2725/

I thought the Wii was the Best-Selling Home/Stationary Console?

Love Nintendo and the Switch, glad to see it doing so well. Video games are a lot different than 20 years ago though. Sony has never had franchises like Mario and Zelda with so much history. It's not Apples to Apples.

@Shulkalot Nah, it really ain't that different. A wider variety, sure, but the mast vajority of Nintendo fans are still just screaming about BOTW 2 and how the world would be better without anime swordfighters. How is playing 3 games any different from playing 2?

@EchoNemesis That´s true! In my country, PS2 games could barely be found on import shops, nobody bought them ever. People just got (way) cheaper copies of them. Also, more consumers had interest in the device because it also plays movie DVDs so it doubled as a DVD player and game console.

This is why they don't care about showing new games in 2020. If sales slowed they'd have to, but why not just wait til then. Not what we want but makes sense business wise.

From that list, on Switch, I loved these games: Zelda: BOTW, Mario Odyssey, and Mario Bros U Deluxe. The other Switch games, not so much. On PS2 side (from this list), I loved: GTA: San Andreas, GTA Vice City, GTA 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Kingdom Hearts. The other PS2 games, not so much. So, if Nintendo got Rockstar (2K) to release some GTA games on Switch......

I thought the big N was doomed! 😂😂

@Octane Same! I grew up in Italy in the early 2000s, and I owned very few PS1/PS2 games that were not bought off a vendor on a street corner. It didn’t help that legit copies of games cost an arm and a leg back then, at least in my country - I still remember my parents buying me a copy of Croc 2 for my birthday in 2001 for 99 thousand Lire (which back then used to be the equivalent of around €90), while pirated copies went for around 10 thousand. 😂

@hadrian Imagine Ocarina of Time with loading times! No thanks. I'm glad Nintendo do things their way.

More than half of Switch owners have played Animal Crossing New Horizons. It is a resounding blockbuster for Nintendo. Nintendo should not forget that some folks might not like New Horizons and have something else in addition to Pikmin for the rest of the year. I would love something new (1st party) besides remastered/deluxe editions, but I will settle for those rumored Mario remasters.

I think people have said, PS2's advantage is that it had those mainstream games and little in competition during the first few years, so massive advantage over Switch, yet this is happening!

The thing I find most surprising here is that Splatoon has outsold Vice City.

That's very impressive. Those attach rates for Switch games are great. 👍

It's not the amount of sales but the timeframe in which sales figures were selling that tells how well it's selling in that short of a time.

@Averagewriter Sony was still a bit scuzzy on the deal too. But, at the same time, it was a big mistake by Nintendo to publically embarrass a partner a big no-no in Japan. Sony made it their mission to embarrass Nintendo for that betrayal and pumped way more money into the Play Station project then they initially wanted to. If Nintendo just quietly axed the deal with Sony then I don't think the PlayStation (one word as it was different from the earlier project) would have been that successful just like the Phillips CDI or the Amiga CD32 because Sony would not have been as driven to make the system a success. But, Nintendo after embarrassing Sony, then went on to alienate partners that gave a revenge-driven Sony the ability to basically destroy the N64 in the market place. If Nintendo kept good relations with those partners and went CD, I don't think Sony would had been able to so easily win that generation. But, that also means no Mario 64, OoT, Majora's Mask and other games as we know them today. So, it was not so bad for the players at the end of the day.

It was not till the Iwata-era that Nintendo made good with a lot of old time partners like Capcom, Square Enix (Enix was never on bad terms with Nintendo, but Square was), Konami, Namco and others. And thanks to Iwata we even saw Sega become a very supportive partner to Nintendo moving forward (they even directed P* to Nintendo when they could no longer support their projects). But, the damage was already done and Sony just cruised through the PS2-era while Nintendo slowly built back up support and now the Switch is looking to remain a dominant platform for the rest of this generation.

I have to ask those where in the Corporations playbook are you reading from to get a one sided sidetrack history. Deals made and deals broken and you cry over spill milk. No wonder your not working for either company.

@Morph The Wii and DS did the feat bringing in "the more casual player" without trouble.

There were less ways to buy games back then and a lot of ps2 owners owned a select amount of RPGs that took forever to finish. This figure is apples and oranges when people buy so many digital games on sale.

@Sinton Probably little, if anything. A DVD feature did not prevent the original Xbox from getting demolished by the PS2, and there's no reason to think it would've done anything to help the Dreamcast combat piracy or the GameCube's kiddy image.

@Averagewriter I'm not disagreeing with you in the slightest. But, Sony never once wanted to budge on the initial terms either and Nintendo would have been left partnerless. Nintendo even tried renegotiating the terms as well, but Sony did not budge which was a bit scuzzy on their part. Also, the SNESCD is a fan name for the project it was always internally known as the Play Station (two words).

Nintendo was a juggernaut of the gaming world and had a history of seeing big-name manufacturers like Phillips, Apple and Amiga fail as they did not understand the marketplace. They had no reason to assume the PlayStation would be a success. But Yamauchi was a prideful man and saw Square as an almost internal development studio. To him a Final Fantasy on a Sony console would be like them putting Mario or Zelda on a competing machine. He saw Square as traitors to Nintendo and wanted no further business relations with them hence why he smeared their names. Notice how he never did that to Enix, but for him Square was personal. It took Iwata a lot of hard work to start getting Square back onboard with Nintendo systems, and he always made good with ex-Square developers (and their studios) like Sakaguchi's Mistwalker and Takahashi's Monolithsoft. I don't think anyone will disagree Nintendo was a tyrant in the 80s and 90s, but modern-day Nintendo is probably one of the most pro-developer, pro-consumer company in the industry today. And, I think on some level it was watching the company lose so much face during the N64 and Gamecube generation.

The industry’s completely different these days. Personally I’m surprised it’s taken until the Switch to beat the PS2’s numbers.

To be fair... no PS2 game made you buy multiple copies of more than one person in your house wants to play it... unlike Animal Crossing!

@Averagewriter The thing about RND cost is that companies always work under the assumption that RND costs can and will be lost before even starting a project. And, it was not uncommon for companies to axe projects and use the RND they have learned to use it in other divisions. The Play Station if axed could have always been integrated into Sony Music to help improve the projects in that division.

It was Nintendo humiliating Sony that really grinded Ken Kutaragi the wrong way. I mean the next day after they showed off the Play Station they announced they cancelled that project and partnered with Phillips. Nintendo allowed Sony to go out there with the full intentions of backstabbing them. That is simply not done in the business world especially in Japanese buisness. He developed the Sound Chip for the SNES the S-SMP. It was his personal reputation with Sony that got smeared by that embarrassment and to him, he wanted to crush Nintendo for what they did to him. Also, Nintendo preferring a non-Japanese company was also not done in Japanese culture at the time so that probably helped Sony give into Kutaragi's effort to turn the Play Station into a standalone console. The fact that Sony backed Kutaragi's passion projected was an inspired decision... even if they offloaded the cost and the project onto Sony Music.

Comparing a console that sells on a select number of games (so: All Nintendo consoles) to a console that sells on a huge number of games (so: All PlayStation consoles) isn't the best comparison. People buy Sony machines for a variety of different games, whereas people buy Nintendo machines for Mario, Zelda, Pokemon etc...

Yes, Switch games are selling incredibly well. Yes that's great. And the achievements of these games should be celebrated.

But there's no need to stick them up against GTA on another platform.

Gaming then:
> GTAIII [PS2]
> GTA Vice City [PS2]
> GTA San Andreas [PS2]

Gaming now:
> GTAV [PS3]
> GTAV [PS4]
> GTAV [PS5]

No offence here (as I have a switch too) but the switch caters heavily towards children and casual gamers where as xbox and playstation cater more towards adults and hard-core gamers, the fact the switch is handheld aswell works as kids can play games anywhere and off the tv to a parents delight.

I mean Mario, animal crossing and pokemon vs final fantasy and gran turismo? What's a kid going it want to play more?

So of course these child "friendly" games in switch are going to sell way more than the hard-core adult and rpg games of the ps2 era

Not to mention that gaming as a whole is a lot bigger now than ever before and it's mainly all kids want these days (thanks to fortnite), of a kid wants a switch to play fortnite then of course eventually he's going to want other games aswell

@Ajent To be fair, in an apples to apples way, sharing a physical copy of Animal Crossing is just the same as sharing a PS2 game. (and to the other side of that, if the two people were trying to play an online/LAN game at the same time, they'd require 2 copies of the PS2 game as well)

"Have you bought many of those best-selling Switch games yourself?"

Yeah, of course. 😀
Animal Crossing New Horizons

Psst...
I'm playing ACNH again during bedtime. 🤫

@Averagewriter yes but how many sales do those visual novels have? Compared to the switch top seller's?

I'm not saying the switch is just for kids but it's way more child friendly than ps4 and xbox. Seeing as the switch has fortnite and pokemon and a tonne of other games that are child friendly. I see no reason why a kid would want any other console other than the switch, can you?

The PS2 is not the best-selling videogame console of all time - it's the best-selling DVD player of all time. More than half of its buyers got it because they wanted a DVD player and saw it as a way to have two devices in one. Those people had a big movie collection, and one game, usually a sports game (for guys) or a dance game (for girls). I witnessed this with my own two eyes.

@Averagewriter well I'm sorry if I worded it in such a way especially as I have a switch myself, I'm was just trying to say that the switch is way more child friendly than the other consoles which has helped massively towards the sales figures of those switch games

@TheWingedAvenger well it was the first console to do that, who wouldn't want a console and a dvd (blu Ray) player in one? If your paying £300 or more you expect it to do more than just play games on a TV

@playstation_king
"Of cOurSe nInteNDo is suCCesSfuL, thEy cAter To cHiLdrEn" is nothing more than a fanboy console war talking point.

@westman98 I have a switch lite and a normal switch so I don't consider myself a fanboy lol I said it's more child friendly that any other console. I didn't say its for kids only?

@Averagewriter Sony had no real interest in the games market before Nintendo approached them with Kutaragi (Kutaragi became good friends with Nintendo higher-ups during his time working on the SNES) with the Play Station project. So if Yamauchi did understand Sony was a threat he created his own worst nightmare. Sony was rather lukewarm on the market as a lot of their own SNES and Genesis games did not make waves in the market. Sony licensed out to 3rd Parties for early PSOne games because they did not know how to make good games. That is partially why Sony does not own Crash or Spyro who were PlayStation's Mascots.

I believe his initial idea was probably to use Sony and learn how to make CD based systems then cut them out when they start development on a 3D based console. And based on how the Sega CD failed he probably thought the Play Station was probably also going to be a market failure and Sony would lose interest all together. I think Yamauchi thought that the Play Station was not going to help Nintendo's long-term goals after renegotiation deals fell through so why even bother. His idea was probably based on previous interactions with Sony that they'd lose interest now that Nintendo was backing away and that probably would have worked... if he made it quiet. But, he made it personal with Kutaragi and that was what did him in. Problem was he let Sony learn from the SNES and gain access to their partners who were not big fans of Nintendo and their tyrant of a boss. So, to Sony this was now personal as Yamauchi made it personal. Nintendo created their greatest rival in gaming simply because Yamauchi thought making an internal issue public was a good idea. He did a lot in his tenure as Nintendo's President.

In the longrun while we look at the Yamauchi-era as Nintendo's golden era. It did longterm damage that only now we are seeing Nintendo recover from after Iwata had to spend most of his career as President make nice with 3rd Parties.

@lacunae not what I said or meant... one house, one Switch, three people want to play... this was a widely reported issue when it launched. To be fair...

@Averagewriter Agreed. I'm sure somewhere there is a universe where the Nintendo Play Station was released. But, in the end we all do ourselves in when we least want to.

@playstation_king
Ok?

Every Nintendo platform caters to children, but not all of them are successful. There is clearly more to the Switch's success than "tEh cHildRen".

Most people bought a ps2 for DVD playback and then GTA so not surprising.

It is worth noting that the PS2 had a ridiculous number of games released, many many major titles from all the big publishers bar Nintendo. Nintendo Switch has fewer original major titles than the PS2 had. Also, Nintendo's biggest selling games are often likely to outsell competitors' as there is always a heavy skew towards Nintendo games sales on Nintendo console, versus sales of games by other publishers. The true stat would be total software sales for the consoles.

@playstation_king
I agree, and in fact I bought the PS2 back then despite really wanting a Game Cube. I had also bought the PS1 instead of the N64 because I didn't have a CD player, so the PS1 served as a stereo as well as a console. Nintendo has lost millions in sales just because they have always left that huge portion of the market to Sony.

@BionicDodo But, that was also a double-edged sword. As tons of great PS2 games could not penetrate the market because there was no easy way to figure out what games were good or not because of the sheer amount of them. Xenosaga being one of the biggest hit by this issue. I only heard about it years after the fact because it was just lost in the shuffle of PS2 games. I would even argue franchise titles like Tales of the Abyss would had done better on GameCube because of the success of Tales of Symphonia despite the PS2's larger install base. GameCube fans were starved for RPG games so something like Xenosaga or Tales of the Abyss would had been instant hits compared to the saturated PS2. Sometimes following the larger install-base does not equate success. Luckily that is less of an issue now as devs tend to avoid this trap and release titles on all platforms to the best of their ability.

The Switch has way less of this issue because of sites like NintendoLife, and the internet has made it a lot easier to shuffle out the worthwhile titles from the not so great ones.

A lot of folk used PS2 as a DVD player. Gaming was secondary. Their build quality was also horrendous. I remember being inundated with juddering trays.

Everyone is acting like the PS2 had poor software sales, but it had a better attach rate than ANY Nintendo hardware. The total PS2 software 50% higher than the total DS software despite similar hardware numbers sold. It sold a TON of software, but it was spread over a huge choice of games. With Switch, everyone has a similar library, ie the Nintendo releases.

@Ajent digital or physical version? I wasn't trying to be snarky or anything, but plugging a cartridge in the switch should work fine for all the users — which was the main point of my previous post. (Yeah, the rules for using digital games is annoying. Probably why all the "real" games I've gotten for the switch have been physical game cards, and the digital ones so far have all been eshop only kinds of things — generally cheap/free. It is also quite annoying that the digital versions of games that are available in game card/cartridge form are not any cheaper when purchased digitally, I guess to make their retail partners happy?)

Great. Now we only need a similar amazing library as the PS2.

Sad noises.

@Averagewriter I got a refurbished PS2 Slim from Gamestop a couple of years ago, and it's amazing how well many of the games hold up, even compared to modern games.

I spent a lot of time playing my PS2 even though I have an Xbox One and PS4.

It's just a great system with a rich library of games to pick from. Plus, I picked up some component cables so I can hook it up to my HDTV, and the games look pretty good now(Although I lost the ability to play PS1 games).

People argue about which system is the greatest of all time, but my vote goes to the PS2. Without a doubt, it is the best game system ever made.

Nearly everyone that owned a ps2 had it hacked to play copied games. Early days of cd writers made it so so easy!

@Averagewriter I recently browsed the PS2 section on Gamestop's website, and its the most expensive PS2 game on there with its price over 100 bucks!

I am kicking myself because back during the PS2's lifespan, I remember seeing that game for 20 or 30 bucks used and kept telling myself "Ah, I'll get it someday."

Its kinda funny, but Gamestop is sold out of all their PS2 consoles, and most of the PS2 games that have listed.

Just shows you how much staying power and popularity that the console has to this day. With so many people having to stay home during the Covid stuff, maybe they decided to enjoy some retro gaming.

Glad to hear you replaced your PS2, did you get the OG model or a Slim one? Also, I can understand how it feels to have people break in and steal valuable games and systems. I'm sorry to hear about the loss of Haunting Ground after seeing the price, and I hope you can get another copy of it someday!

@StevenG I absolutely had to look it up after reading this cause I was so curious to see what was the total amount of games between the two of them:

Nintendo switch: 2709 games according to Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Switch_games_(A%E2%80%93L)

For the ps2 there was a total of 4489 (wiki as well) GAMES! HOLY COW!

It'll be super exciting to see where the switch ends up. Got a feeling the switch will edge out ps2!

@EchoNemesis
I have always suspected that this is so much the success of those consoles (psx and ps2)

@Yosher I think a lot of people are overlooking the real reason the PS2 sold as much as it did.
It was a cheap all-in-one of movie and music cd player on top of gaming.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that most people bought it more as a multimedia device rather than a pure gaming machine, unlike the Switch.

As some have mentioned, while the best sellers on the Switch generally sold more than the PS2 equivalents, if you look at the whole list, you'll see 35 titles on the Switch that have sold 1 million+, compared to the 163 titles the PS2 had. On top of that, the best sellers were GTA and Gran Turismo, games with a somewhat more limited audience compared to, say, Mario Kart 8 DX, Pokemon, or Animal Crossing.
It's still impressive, don't get me wrong, but there's a very clear reason why the PS2 didn't have titles that reached the same heights as the Switch.

At #4, zelda: breath of the wild, 18+ million. Which is why Nintendo rarely drops their prices. It keeps selling, at full price.

For all the NintenDoomed fandom the Switch doesn't ubber GPU to makes sales and that is a Fact. GPU isn't what going to makes sales for you or keep market shares for your system as well. The Switch will make it's own wake regardless of ubber GPU system. Love how people want to compare a no longer in Production system to a current production to use to blooster their koolaid ranking. If one does proportion math with the same timeline the Switch currently would outrank ps2 sales. You compare a 3yr system with a ps2 that no longer produced or has longed gone with a new system Shows the disparation they must go to beat a dead horse to shine their koolaid at.

Yeah only difference is that on PS2 you have Sony, Konami, Square Enix, 2K, Bandai Namco selling multi million copies of games

On the other you have... Nintendo.

Obvious by that list, nobody else is selling 10 million copies of anything on Switch, Let alone 17 million.

@Octane seems you been missing out on the whole indie scene that Nintendo has been catering as well. Many are also buying the switch cause now they all have the ability to take their favorite Indies on the Go as well. There is a reason why many 3 parties are flocking to the switch, just look at switch top sellers list, you will see an indie game or third party triple A once in a while =:3

@hadrian Heard Sony had patent on DVD and bluray based consoles and they wanted to make Nintendo pay the big money to use this format as a revenge.

@playstation_king Spiderman is much more popular with kids than Animal Crossing

Impressive but the market’s bigger now than it was back in the PS2 days.

Not to poop on the PlayStation or Sony but am I the only person who felt the PlayStation 2 was somewhat overrated?
I know people like one of my uncles who bought one as a DVD Player and can still occasionally play games. They don't really game no more.
Also I feel that the Nintendo Switch is on-track to do Wii/DS/PS2 numbers. My initial estimates were 120 million but now I think at the rate they're going they're going to beat that and be closer to the 150 mark.

As others have said, PS1, PS2 and Wii sales are heavily skewed by sales to non-gamers. When PS1 launched, CD players were expensive (we were still using cassettes primarily.) PS1 was one of the cheapest CD players you could buy, and it also played games. Sony used the cost of games to subsidize the cost of the player, so every game players bought, they were paying to subsidize the adoption of the redbook audio format.

When PS2 launched, DVD players were very expensive. PS2 was significantly cheaper than most DVD players, and also played DVDs, again using game sales to subsidize the adoption of DVD video, so every game a gamer bought you paid for someone else's video player. A lot of PS2s were sold purely as DVD players for people's movies with no intention to play games. The hardware sales aren't a good reflection of just people buying the machine to play games. Game sales were also good, but Playstation does tend to appeal to a lot of people that just buy that one or two games they want to play, and that's it so the high numbers aren't always a reflection of frequent gamers.

Wii had the same problem. The numbers are inflated because at the time, it was the cheapest, smallest box you could stream the newly burgeoning Netflix services on (before that Netflix was a DVD rental service that you sent discs back and forth in the mail.) It inflated Wii numbers just to be used as a streaming box by non-gamers.

PS3 tried to do the same with BlueRay. It was the cheapst BD player around at the time, but it was still so exorbitantly expensive that people just skipped BD entirely for a long time.

But Sony ran out of new media formats to push, and this time around WiiU, Switch, PS4 all took the route of focusing on gaming only to avoid making a bunch of money-losing hardware units to sell to people who don't buy games. XBone infamously tried to double down on being a DVR at first which hurt it the entire generation.

@X-blades Now remove all the games that didn't get a physical release from the Switch count. PS2 didn't have digital delivery and any game that doesn't get a physical release is probably shovelware.

It's going to be interesting how the new gen is going to affect the Switch sales. I think that there will be a hit, but meanwhile Nintendo keeps releasing great games, they will be fine IMO

@playstation_king
Everything you've said was the most idiotic thing I've heard all year, so far!
Nintendo is hard core! I'm guessing you never played NES or SNES Classics?!! And just because a game doesn't have animated blood or cussing in it doesn't mean it's "just for kids"! I'm 31, and find Nintendo's Masterpieces more appealing!
You can keep your lamestation "king"! 😆 🤣 😂

@SnesSwitch ah here we have a fan boy, all I said was the switch is more child friendly than any of the other consoles atm, I have 4 kids in my family and all wanted a switch over a ps4 all because of Mario and pokemon.

Also I have two switches myself and fully enjoy the games I've got at the moment (paper mario, pokemon sword, Botw and splation 2), I'm not bashing the switch and I'm not saying its just for kids

@SnesSwitch and no i have never played any nes or snes games tbh I only got into Nintendo console gaming starting with the wii.

@smashbrolink That's actually a solid point, I completely forgot about this. I have a PS2 myself but I forgot it could do more than just play games.

@Averagewriter flea markets always had fake games, street vendors, “that friend” etc.

I lived in a nowhere’s tobacco town in central NC and all the Playstation people had fake games while I’m begging my parents for money for 64 and Gamecube money

@playstation_king stfu hypocrite 😆 🤣 😂

Wow, salty Nintendo troll alert

@SNES64DD I hage felt this way for years myself, I enjoyed my time with it but I really couldnt tell ypu whqt ky favorite now gta ps2 games was at all. Whereas as the xbox, dreamcast, and gamecube I definitely know those, Halo 2, power stone 2, and metroid prime. Obviously the ps2 outsold them, but it was also on the market for 2 years before 2 of them even got their foot in the market and one was entirely new with an unproven/very hated parent company.

@Wexter Dont even remind me of xenosaga. I was all excited to hear about the plans foe that franchsise, the 6 games got truncatee and 3 didnt feel like a proper end at all, all because the 2nd one was so different from the 1st that it performed terribly, I never even got to play it since I had an aversion to it because of that.

@StevenG I get your point, and you are right! But then would a better metric be based on development size and cost? Because atm almost all physically released games these days have much much larger teams than the ps2 era.

The barrier of entry has just become so high that ps2 sized teams would only be able to make digital games.

Depends on Nintendo and Market though. Unfortunate for Wii, it tracked way more than PS2 but drop dead when it reaches 85m. Hope Nintendo and 3rd party can sustain the switch for few more years.

@GrailUK Imagine an Ocarina of Time where you could save the game, quit, and start up exactly where you quit instead of in a town or the start of a dungeon.

@Magitek_Knight If we see a remake, I'm sure that kind of modern approach will be implemented. (It still would have sucked as a CD)

@GrailUK I'm not so sure. Better audio, potential for cutscenes rendered in CG as opposed to in-engine (which wouldn't have aged that well but probably would have been wild at the time). But then I was a PS/Pc owner during that time and load times are usually no big deal to me.

I find CG cutscenes to be immersion breaking. Look at FFVII. It's a mess. 3 different art styles is disjointed to me. (Just my personal taste ^^)

I would say with the reopening of the gaming and film industry over the next two months, there is going to be a mini art/media renaissance due to people returning to their creative jobs with a vengeance. Coupled with the fact the virus is still going to leave most people indoors, companies will want to jump on pushing out entertainment media in order to capitalize on a larger average of consumption. I think this year is going to be one of the biggest years in media revenue in history.

@jorel262 i'm a bigger nintendo fan but sony had crash and spyro but since they're trilogies are now on switch there is literally no reason for me to get a playstation system until they release something that i'm interested in and it's first party exclusive

@X-blades I have to disagree, nothing says the games need to be that big.

I'm surprised there are no FIFAs or PES on that list. I love the variety on the Switch side.
Though maybe the Switch also needs more of these other of titles. I still hope a GTA game comes to Switch one day for instance -_-