I'm annoyed with mundane revisionist history
Yesterday I did something stupid. I went to reddit and responded to a comment. The comment in question was talking about how popular the PS2 was because it also functioned as a DVD player. I pointed out that few people would have bought a PS2 because it was more expensive than a standalone device, and didn't come with a remote. People often get confused about this because the PS3 basically fit this description: it was one of the best and cheapest blu-ray players for quite a while. Naturally when I went back to look at reddit today I found a bunch of people saying "nuh-uh" and my response had negative karma.
There's a lot of revisionist history when it comes to video games. For the earlier generation, there seems to be this idea that the Sega Saturn couldn't do "real" 3D graphics and the Playstation couldn't do "real" sprites - in spite of a massive library of titles that directly prove that they both draw 2D and 3D graphics just fine - heck, there's a bunch of people out there who think Symphony of the Night on PSX is one of the best pixel art games of all time.
I don't really care much about these specific examples, because they're ultimately meaningless. It's not remotely likely that these "factoids" will make a difference to anyone's life. What I do care about, however, is what it says about society. We already know reddit is an echo chamber, but if we can't figure out what the actual truth of history was, we're doomed as a species.
I think what it says about society is that humans have worse memory than we think. Maybe also that we can easily reinforce the false memories collectively. See also the Mandela Effect stuff (particularly early on before people started calling any 'ol memory fart a 'mandela effect').
Because prior to reading this, I would have firmly stated, with no malicious intent, that the PS2 sold well because it doubled as a DVD player. That is exactly my memory of it. But you're likely right that I'm just mixing it up with the PS3.
I actually ended up responding to my naysayers on reddit even though it won't make a difference. I looked up the Radio Shack catalog for the year 2000, and on page 178 it lists a DVD player for $50 less than the PS2 launch price. The catalog would have been published nearly a year before the release of the PS2.
I don't doubt that the DVD capability of the system made it a more attractive option than the only other option at the time, the Dreamcast, but people were very clearly buying it to play games on, not to watch movies. I can't speak for everyone in the world, but by the time I had a PS2 our family already owned a DVD player (hooked up with S-Video for the ultimate in picture quality). Then again, I grew up in a TV repair shop, so I'm probably not the ideal choice for a statistical sample.
The catalog lists an RCA DVD player for $50 less, which is an apples-to-oranges comparison to a top-tier brand like Sony. Buying a PS2 was one of the cheapest ways you could get an excellent DVD player and you got the latest video game console bundled with it.
The fact that it was a cheap DVD player was absolutely a major factor in its success.
While that is true, the argument being made is that the PS2's DVD playback was not the primary factor in its success. DVD playback was a smart choice on Sony's part as it would allow for more expansive game data. However, what investing in video playback added was further versatility in marketing the game system.
Sony marketed the PS2 as able to serve a slew of different functions, such as a Linux dev machine, a soon-to-be online console, a DVD player, an expanded PS1, and yes, a next-gen game console. But aside from being a next-gen console, none of the other factors in isolation were major components of the PS2's success. Rather, Sony threw a lot of ideas at the wall to show how their new device could serve as the center of one's home entertainment setup, which was significant to its competitive marketing against other game consoles of the time.
What the ability to play DVDs brought was the opportunity to appeal to households who were looking to upgrade both their home entertainment system and their pre-existing game console. However, such a demographic would have been minor compared to those who were more motivated by the appeal of next-gen gaming, especially those who waited on the 1999 (western) release of the Dreamcast for the PS2 instead.
Given how popular the PSX had become over the prior five years, when it came to secondary features, buyers were more motivated by the fact that the PS2 featured hardware playback support of PS1 games, allowing them to sell their PS1s and offset the cost of a new console purchase without losing any access to their invested game library. No other game console could boast that. When one started assessing the other, more secondary features such as DVD playback, it only added to the PS2's main selling point as a versatile game console.
For some homes, the PS2 was their first DVD player, but for many more homes, it would be their second. In remembering the PS2's effect on DVD adoption, what people are forgetting is this more nuanced part. It was more often the way that DVD playback was expanded in the home than it was the outright introduction to the home.
Disclaimer because I did not own any consoles as my parents refused to buy them, but this is the main thing I remember being talked about at the time, it was a significant and uncommon feature.
The DVD player functionality was a significant factor in convincing my parents to buy a PS2 for the family. We didn't have one, and it made sense to get a multi-purpose device.
It is apples-to-oranges in that the RCA player was competing against a device that did not yet exist. Beyond that, in 2000 RCA was still known for having decent quality to my memory. A standalone device would have also likely had better picture quality simply for the ability to use better quality cables than the proprietary ones that Sony manufactured for the PS2.
Look in the 2001 catalog, which would have been published just a few months after the release of the PS2, and you will find one that is $100 less. Either way, the PS2 would not have come with a DVD remote, so if you wanted all the features you would have gotten with the standalone DVD player you'd need to spend at least an additional $20 for the remote.
I acknowledged that the DVD capabilities were a selling point, but it was not the primary reason why someone would be purchasing the system. If you wanted a DVD player you would buy a DVD player. If you wanted a game system too, you might have purchased a PS2 instead of a DVD player, but you would not buy a PS2 if you just wanted a DVD player.
I'll agree that I doubt there was a significant contingent of buyers that bought a PS2 exclusively for DVD playing (though they existed, I had a roommate who did just that!). But we're talking about an era with fewer TVs per household, so mixed use was much more significant; a household might not be willing to spend on a DVD player, but if it also doubled as a game system for their kids, maybe it makes its way under the Christmas tree. "Cheap" and "plays DVDs" were major drivers for the console.
RCA was a budget name at least as early as the '90s. Decent quality? Sure, but again, it's not a top-tier brand, and people do go out of their way to pay for those.
Anecdotally, I'll add that I didn't know a single person who had the remote for watching DVDs on PS2—and close to everyone I knew had one! TVs were smaller and couches closer, I have my doubts that the DVD remote was all that significant a feature for people at the time.
I was about to say that if people are obviously incorrect, the silver lining is that at least you can be pretty confident you're talking to a person, because AI models most often get things like this right these days, assuming you ask the question correctly. Sometimes I get mad about people posting things that don't survive a simple google check, but I have to remind myself that this is part of interacting with other humans. If I wanted agreeable all the time I could just talk to an LLM. So I did ask an LLM and it told me that DVDs were a major selling point.
Here's a quote from wikipedia that it referenced:
So, I think for this topic it ends up being a fine-grained detail regarding wording. Was the PS2 popular because it was a DVD player? I feel like there is a spectrum of interpretation for this statement that could put you on either side of it. Did people buy it solely to be a DVD player without caring about gaming? Probably not in most cases. Did the DVD functionality heavily contribute to the purchase decision? Probably in most cases. So for me, I would prefer to move on to the next point, because this one doesn't seem worth it to fight over.
FWIW, you are most certainly correct. I bought a nice Sony DVD player far before the PS2 launched for less than the launch price of the PS2. Also, the PS2 was a pretty bad DVD player. The interface was terrible not even including the lack of build in remote. This would be like people not buying a CD player because they could get a PS1 (hint: it was also a terrible music player).
This TED talk on what it feels like to be wrong came up recently in a group discussion I was a part of, I think you'll appreciate it: https://youtu.be/QleRgTBMX88?si=wWgPHqA1XDIigZmI
I feel like the Orange Site thrives on kneejerk reactions and who can make the "funniest" comment first. After
xnumber of comments, the thread's - regardless of wherever it's posted - usefulness turns into perlin noise with diminishing returns. It's gotten so bad for me, personally, in the last couple of years that I've developed a solution to combat the ridiculousness of the site at large: joining shitpost subred's. Since I view the entire site as one big joke, I just went full cowling into absurdism - subscribing to circlejerk subred's - and my experience got immensely better knowing that there's no stakes in any given thread.Not to focus too much on the Orange Site, at risk of derailing the topic - sorry - I was born around the time that the PS2 was the hot new thing. My awareness surfaced around the PS3's release date. I come from a lower class, so I was never really "up to date". Best thing I had was an N64 for a decade and an NDS a few years after it released. I believe it was 2016 or so when I received a PS4 for a Christmas gift, and it didn't dawn on me until nearly nine years later that you could use (the ones with optical drives) them for watching media, albeit with some tweaks on later consoles. Not sure why it took me that long.
I look back for some perspective, in a headspace where in some alternate universe, where I did have the knowledge that those things could be used as media players, and, frankly, I don't see why anyone would say anything different. In my opinion, a media player is a media player - if it works...then, it works. I do consider the rise of flat screen TVs to be a factor that kinda shifts things around a bit, CRTs were a thing (damn, I miss CRTs in general), but...why would someone state the contrary? People are strange. We live in a society.
Regarding the first paragraph, it's genuinely frustrating because reddit is often times the best (albeit still often awful) platform for large-scale discussions within certain fan groups. For example, last night after I watched the season finale of Fallout, I went to the fallout sub to read about theories, hopes for season 3, explanations of things that weren't clear to me, etc. Instead it was like 40% stupid joke comments like "wow I can't believe <insane thing nobody's stupid enough to believe> happened!".
So I let it sit over night hoping the jokes would naturally fall below the upvote count of actual discussion and while it did, it was still like 20% joke comments this morning. Super aggravating.
This has always been the case. People like a good story more than the truth. If that’s an indication that society is doomed, then society has always been doomed. Is what it is.
From Columbus proving the world is round to “Et Tu, Brute?” to “let them eat cake”, people have never let the truth get in the way of a good narrative.
Bear with me for a paragraph or two, because I know I'm going to draw comparisons to this topic, but that's a very ironic example to land on. SotN isn't a 2D game; it's produced by generating tons of 3D quads made up of two triangles with a texture applied to the front to create a "2D" platformer. Its pixel art is gorgeous, but the aesthetic was enabled by 3D-enabled physics and rendering effects: rotations, alignment free of the graphics rendering "grid", scaling, particles, transparency, etc. Then Konami ported SotN over to the Saturn, where it had slowdown from a mix of a 3D engine they couldn't tweak appropriately for the console, a higher resolution, they had to take some of the rendering effects out... With time/resources they probably could've done it more properly, but difficulties porting a 3D engine were certainly the root cause there. It was endemic to Saturn programming and porting, from what I'm seeing - more complicated software solutions which could've been solved by better 3D hardware architecture, and devs didn't or couldn't put in the work. (A few discussions draw comparison to Sony biting themselves in the ass with the PS3's Cell.)
Don't sell yourself short on getting annoyed about these things! I love the pixel art in Undertale, but the way the characters rotate and otherwise transform give the game a very comparatively contemporary indie feeling, not that of an older system. To use something in GameMaker might break suspension of disbelief someone could do a particular effect on an older system. It's something I've thought about as someone who someday wants to make a game that has an older console feel. That's art, babyyy!
Part of my point bringing all that up is that we're here. I see you regularly through tildes! I don't want to be venomous about talking about any of this, or get on your ass! I'm happy to have someone come in and teach me more about these things! And I try to modify my writing because it's a much closer-knit group here of people who I'm more conscious of not being a dick to. Meanwhile, thousands of reddit threads involve people getting into giant chains of bite-sized corrections in the weeds, and it's because the site thrives on faster, shittier interactions. It's goddamn exhausting and grating dealing with the greek chorus about all this, and it's never going to change because there's nowhere but the bottom line for it.
Not your fault, try your best not to let it get to you, but, yeah. reddit. Expect stupid out because the site incentivizes stupid in. There are a decent number across generations who are recognizing all this crap in their feeds, and I hope it results in some upending of these systems, but until then we just gotta strive to make something better.
How much people who bought the PS2 cared that it also played DVD's or that it didn't come with a remote seems like a subjective judgement call? Maybe you could find surveys from back then but getting into an argument about it seems fairly pointless.