Sony PlayStation has been around for 24 years since its inception in 1994, and has seen its fair share of mistakes in its lifetime. Well it doesn’t mean it’s all bad as there have also been quite a few things to note about Sony’s success with their console. We’ll show you what you need to know about Sony’s biggest gaming successes.
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1. PS Now Cut Prices
We all love streaming services right? Microsoft is working on Project xCloud which will be able to run Microsoft games across many devices including your laptop, mobile phone, and other smart devices. Even Google is creating a streaming service with Google Stadia which is definitely on the way. Since Nintendo doesn’t have any streaming service in mind, this leaves PlayStation with their PlayStation Now Subscription service.
PlayStation Now first released back in 2014 as a sort of beta where players would be able to stream games onto their PS Vita and PS TVs. It has gone and passed for previous PlayStation entries such as the PS Vita and PlayStation 3 by 2017. Well this didn’t stop them from improving it with the PlayStation 4 in 2018.
PlayStation Now eventually became subscription service for the Playstation 4 and currently acts similar to other subscription services such as the Xbox Games Pass and was pretty pricey as well. For a yearly subscription, it’s $99.99, for a quarterly service its $49.99 and finally for the monthly subscription, it’s $19.99. Well starting on Oct. 1 things have changed when Sid Shuman, the Senior Director of Sony Interactive Entertainment Content Communications announced on the PlayStation Blog that the service was getting a huge price cut. Now it’s $59.99 yearly, $24.99 quarterly, and $9.99 monthly. That’s a pretty big deal and additionally from Oct. 1 to January 2, 2020, God of War, Grand Theft Auto V, Infamous Second Son and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s end have also been added to the subscription catalog to sweeten the deal.
According to the blog post, they explained that the prices needed to change to keep in line with other subscription services, so we can be assured that we won’t have any more extremely expensive things that Sony will sell to us. Hopefully, Sony will keep this up with prices in the future.
2. PlayStation Portable
When the PlayStation Portable was first announced, it seemed to be the next step in gaming, a portable console with just enough power to surpass other portable games at the time of it’s release in 2005 and for the most part, ran well with 3D graphics. This was quite the change from your usual spritework that’s usually seen from handheld devices and was basically considered to be the future of gaming in 2005. In fact, it was thought that the PSP would last longer than we’d originally think as it sold around 82 million copies in its lifetime which isn’t as good as the PS2’s 155 million, but it’s definitely got people’s attention.
Well eventually this led to the PS Vita being released in 2011 which included all sorts of new features and quite a few games. Unfortunately after assuming that people will just buy their newest portable console, no advertisements were really marketed to people outside fo Japan, so the sales in that case suffered tremendously as only about 15 million copies were sold.
Now why did the PSP do way better than the new and improved Vita? Well you could say that their marketing was simply bad as they pretty much assumed people would buy the Vita on their own and the PSP at the time had so much advertisements going for it and the types of games you could play on the go looked pretty good at the time with all of the first-party support. If you look at the PS Vita, there was no big main lineup of games that were available. It’s not like a Jak and Daxter spinoff or a Spyro game were getting made for the Vita. Additionally, most of the games were considered mediocre on first release, so that’s a dealbreaker right there. Well all this means is that the PSP is known as Sony’s more successful handheld consoles that they’ve released.
3. The PlayStation 4
Everybody knows the PlayStation 4, it’s the main competitor against the Xbox One right? Well obviously it’s a bit more than that. If you look at the sales, the console surpasses 100 million units being sold since its release in 2013. This is the second-biggest sales achievement since Sony’s PlayStation 2 but we’ll get to that later.
Well what does make the Playstation 4 special? It’s been six years since the console’s release in 2013 and the PS4’s been going strong ever since. My theory is that over the years, PlayStation has been making some interesting deals with exclusivity or at the very least timed exclusivity as of recent. For Red Dead Online, PlayStation gets all of the free content first before Xbox One does and also as of recent, PlayStation gets the SpecOps survival modes for Call of Duty Modern Warfare earlier before the other console. In any case, the PlayStation 4 kind of has a foothold on ps4-exclusive content.
4. PlayStation 2 Best Selling Console of All Time
Since the PlayStation 4 is the second-best-selling Sony console, that means that in first place with 155 million units sold is the PlayStation 2 which happens to beat the original PlayStation which sold at 102 million units. Now that is a pretty big leap of success for Sony. In fact Sony was so hyped for this success, they wanted to sell their PlayStation 3 at around $499 to $599 at the start, but quickly backtracked, but I digress. The PlayStation 2 simply had a lot of games during its lifetime, we got more of the Ratchet and Clank series, Jak and Daxter and Kingdom Hearts I and II.
With all of these successful series’ following the PS2 around, it’s no wonder that this classic console was able to get so many units sold in its lifetime. It’s so crazy that the PS4 has yet to reach the sales of this console as of 2019. Maybe when the PlayStation 5 gets released, we can probably see the console selling more than the PS2, but we’ll have to wait and see.
5. Long-Lasting Exclusives
When we think of Sony and the PlayStation, what do you think of first? Of course you think of the games! That’s right, PlayStation has several new and old exclusives that they like to take care of, even if it seems like they don’t care at all. First let’s think of all of the games that have served Sony pretty well. God of War has been going on since 2005 and has been continued in 2018 with well… God of War. Also, look at the Last of Us and Uncharted series. Uncharted has been around since 2007 and has been going on since 2017 as far as we know. Additionally, the Last of Us has gotten such a good following with 7 million copies sold. Lasting from the PS3 with the remaster coming out in 2014 for the PS4 and with a sequel on the way, we think that PlayStation’s Exclusive IP’s are one of their strong suits.
Conclusion
So what do you think of the list? Do you think that there are other successes that PlayStation has made over the years? Let us know in the comments.
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You’re damn right, unlike Nintendo that have 4 flop consoles under their belt out of 7 the past 30 years. The SNES that failed to sell more than their first console, the next 2 the N64 and Gamecube that each were bigger failures then the last. Then the Wii U which didn’t even hit Gamecube numbers.
The NES, Wii and Switch are basically flukes at this point.