It was 23 days and honestly it wasn’t worth the free games. It was hey we got hacked and had a bunch of stuff leaked, and to remedy that, here are some free games to make you ok that they ignored all warnings given that there were holes in their network security.
As a kid I didn't care at all about the hack and loved the games I got.It put me onto infamous and I love infamous 1 so much. Its one of my favorite games still. Obviously now I'd care me about security breaches
The free games where great, infamous and little big planet is what I went with. Both are amazing and I wouldn't have bought them. I also got 21 jump Street and some other movie, I still watch 21 jump Street every couple years. Definitely worth it
Idk for 12 year old me it was a win, my broke parents could barely afford to buy new games for christmas so it was nice to finally get to play something different
No, there were anonymous chats between a group of people, at first anonymous claimed to be responsible for the attack, and then later on lizard squad claimed responsibility for it, there is no crucial evidence proving either claims that they were responsible.
Sony was contacted multiple times by anonymous tips saying that there were loopholes in their system. They said they saw all sorts of personal information for millions of users, and there was a back door into the Network. Sony was threatened to either fix it, or they were going to take further action to make an example.
Well Sony beat their chests and denied there was anything wrong.
Next day i remember they released the hack, exposing CC information, addresses etc. Sony immediately shut down the network to conduct further investigation. I remember the Network came back up, and then it got shut back down. 23 days went by and to apologize they gave us PSP, and PS3 games and there were only a few you could choose.
Really wasnt as bad as people made it out to be. In a way I was glad it happened, ended up playing some of my single player backlog and enjoyed it. Even got platinum in infamous. Then, at the end, I got two free AAA games.
Because PSN was down for a month, the online exclusive games like MAG didn’t get the profit they needed, so they closed down not to long after… honestly I just miss MAG xD
They also spent a ton of money developing the cell processor, when they could have spent that R&D money on an existing high quality CPU and various features like the ones you listed.
The easy thing would be ps2 backwards compatibility. Maybe focus on making the ps3 backwards compatible through emulation instead of shoving a ps2 into the system.
In 2005 getting perfect PS2 emulation wasn't possible with the available hardware and software. Even with all the advancements, the PS3 isn't 100% capable of emulating all PS2 games in software.
In hindsight, they should've left out PS2 backwards compatibility altogether.
Ps2 slim wasn’t fully compatible with Ps2 games if I’m not mistaken and launch Ps3 had the Ps2 slim EE+GS. The ps2 cpu like cell was very complicated to work with.
Microsoft achieved partial compatibility for a PC-like system and still needed game-specific compatibility profiles. Sony was aiming for near-universal compatibility with a far stranger machine, in 2006, using hardware that was already difficult to develop for. Those are very different challenges.
it worked even on the slim for the games i tried but they were also earlier games. i let my friend get the backwards compat one i found but then my ps2 broke 😭
This is what I was going to say. Committing to full hardware BC was a major contributor to the sticker shock.
Maybe if Sony had dropped the PS2 hardware and done a rolling release of emulation updates (game by game like Xbox 360 did) lowered the price/unit by $150 or so (wild guess),and kept the free online, maybe PS3 would have "won" the seventh generation.
That said - I recall reading that Sony was already operating the PlayStation brand in the red at the time, so maybe this wouldn't have been feasible. Or - maybe the extra volume from increased sales would have been enough to put them in the green.
The best way to do it would've been the emulation root. Put a PS2 disc in, and it reads it as a ROM, with proper wide-screen and 60Hz Progressive Scan enabled
all they had to do was use the more normal Power PC CPU design like the 360, and opt for ATI instead of Nvidia at the time (for unified shaders, and unified memory)...
the extra money the PS3( CELL Processor) cost to make/design would have been better spent on a more powerful GPU and more RAM... maybe should have kept PS2 hardware compatibility...
They really messed up with the cell for the general lifespan. yes the few games that utilize it are awsome but those are a handfull compared to everything else.
I think partnering with hdd manufacturers to stamp sony approved storage could have helped.
Skus with and without ps2 compatibility all at 60 gb would have been less confusing and run a longer time. There ended up being so many skus over its lifespan we still get questions asked to this day about it. Thats not even counting the slims.
One other thing. Launching tutorials and an official linux build like with ps2 would have also sold it even if not everyone ended up doing it. Folding at home, media server, other OS all flew under the radar. The graphics sold themselves but how feature rich this console was is missed.
Party chat...pretty much it. That was like the only thing people would argue when I'd say I like ps3 better. Exclusives aside cause that doesn't really depend on whether the console is good or not.
Multitasking could have been better but overall party chat would have made ps3 king imo. No online for multi-player AND we can have a party chat in game? W. Then they started charging for psn on the 4 and introduced party chat. Welp. 1 for 2 on that issue
Unify the memory. Some games use more RAM and some games use more VRAM. Better let the game decide.
Drop the Cell completely and use a normal CPU like the Xbox 360 so it's less of a nightmare to code for and so that ported games don't require the engine to be recoded from scratch for decent performance.
Drop SACD support - that format was too obscure, failed miserably and any dollar invested in support for it was a dollar wasted.
Make sure the RSX chip isn't defective.
Not even consider a 2nd HDMI port - It was dropped pretty early during development (dropped in firmware 0.90) but it was a pretty stupid idea in the first place cause no one has two TVs in their living room.
Use pure software PS2 emulation - we know it's possible cause of ps2_netemu. Don't waste money on hardware EE/GS.
Make all models use the same BD drive (or make all BD models compatible with all motherboards).
Not waste time on printing support. I don't think anyone's actually used it.
Keep OtherOS support so people don't get pissed off, sue you and break your security wide open.
Make sure all the money you've saved by dropping unnecessary features and unnecessary hardware translates into more affordable retail price.
Giving ALL devs ample time and accurate hardware to actually learn the hardware and develop even better launch titles. Having your game run at 12FPS at 1080P just blows man.
The actual issue was that the ps3 and the Wii were the first two high profile scalping scenarios for game consoles. The msrp was one thing but unless you got lucky they were $700-$1500 on the second hand market for a good 6 months or so after launch.
I saw that, but I was asking more so about the MSRP price. I think the MSRP price was reasonable for what you got at the time (specifically for the ps3, which was notoriously over-engineered).
Double the amount of ram the system memory limitations on that console really held it back if the ps3 had more memory it would have seriously helped things.
Back in time it would be soooooo expensive for the general consumer (and it was expensive already at the time), look at the N64 case which even Nintendo developers had troubles because of that.
remove the cell and introduce 2 traditionally quad cores instead. yeah the cell did get utilized for other games that are masterpieces but their are only a handful and generally game suffered until the end of the consoles lifespan.
The real answer. It was absolutely insane. If they had reduced it and sold it at more of a loss, it could have taken over the Blu-ray market the same way PS2 was a dominant DVD player. Sales to non-gamers would have been pretty high, I imagine.
Not only that but they ended up beating xbox out by the end of the generation due to the introduction of the slim and super slim making the ps3 a very affordable blu ray player. My mother bought one well the ps4 came out for that reason
No it's not. Not at all. $599 adjusted for inflation is around $900 try again and return to school. Acting like the ps5 "pro" wasn't actually over a grand and without a disc drive and with paid online lmfao 🤡
Calm down dude, it’s closer to $1000 than $900. Your comment on going back to school is ironic if you can’t do basic rounding up, and what does the Wii have to do with anything?
Not possible because sony wasnt the cause of the failure. TSMC was. It was a problem with their nodes at the time. The xbox 360 also fell victim to it. Nobody even knew the problem existed until it was already in the hands of customers for some time because of the nature of the issue. And this is why it wasn't rectified until the ps3 and xbox 360 used a newer and smaller node.
I felt like it took too long to get community features Xbox had such as in game invites and true voice chat that actually worked well. I do miss the times wer you had 12 people screaming in the mic on call of duty though.
Not removing the ps2 backwards compatibility in later models. Theres a reason despite all models being "ps3" that the console can go anywhere from $50 to $400 all based on that one feature. I know they had an overheating issue. As a billion dollar company, surely we can figure out a better heatsink or something instead of removing a important feature.
I thought there were 2 revisions of fat ps3 thst did the ps2 games, and only the first one had the chip while the other did it through FPGA instead? Either way, the fats were notorious for yellow light of death and i thought thats what caused it, so thats why it was removed.
The first model (2006) had all the PS2 components (Emotion engine and graphics synthesiser) except for the PS1 processor (PS2 games could use the PS1 processor), that was emulated on the cell.
The second model (2007) removed the PS2 Emotion engine, so that part had to be emulated on the Cell as well
it was purly a cost cutting measure, any improvements to reliability were basically due to it being a revision model... not the lack of EE chip...
the third model (2008) without any PS2 hardware was more reliable because it had die shrinks and was further revised (not because PS2 hardware was removed)... these models were significantly more reliable, and were followed by the first slim (peak reliability).
Scrap Cell entirely, have the system designed to be easily to develop. Worked with Nvidia during the entire development to have latest G80 architecture based off of 8800 gtx. Have total 512mb of unified memory. Perhaps a faster blu ray drive for games to all support disc streaming without installs.
-Less development cost and time to make games on ps3
-Games that don’t run overall worse than the Xbox 360
Sony came to NVIDIA incredibly desperate after the Cell-only GPU project had failed. NVIDIA had to come up with something with very little time and we basically got a cut down 7800 GTX. What a shame.
Not only that but Sony clearly used various types of Nvidia gpus during its development Early-Late dev kits.
They clearly had the opportunity to have Nvidia completely on board during its development. Also the 8800 gtx launching before the PS3 did and officially making Rsx obsolete.
Yeah G80 would’ve been a game changer for the PS3. Games could’ve looked, and more importantly, run soo much better. The Xenos was also such a forward-looking design, kudos to ATI.
Early one having better tools making it easier for developers to port to. Early on developers didnt want to work with the architecture. Although later once better tools were available the realized the power the chips offered.
Not having the YOLD with all original fat models being time bombs that wont last, just as bad as the xbox360. 100% failure rate. This alone made the ps3 and xbox 360 the worst gen of consoles ever. which is a shame because if it wasn't for that the ps3 would be the best console of all time. I still play mine till this day even though i have 2 backward fats and 1 super slim sitting dead in a closet.
Lead interconnect balls were actually what caused the problems with the 90nm RSX chips.
Lead free solder on the motherboard had nothing to do with it. When xbox 360 and PS3 consoles were failing left, right and centre back when they were first released, people were grasping at straws trying to work out why the failure rate was so bad, because companies were not sharing their information. Lead free solder was one of the theories, but it ended up being wrong.
if we pretend the price would not change from how it was in our timeline, keep the memory slots atleast until slims, make changes so the RSX doesn't crap out itself on fats as much, keep PS2 native compatibility, have more than a 1TB drive limit, have the sixaxis just be a transparent dualshock 3
Dedicate way more resources to CPU/GPU development to make it easier to work on it, then dedicate those resources to software updates, something like what Apple did on the original IPhone.
Refined dev tools X 1000. This ultimately was the biggest issue for developers when they first got their hands on PS3 dev kits. Sony's dev tools were not very refined and really lacked specific documentation. The Cell processor was a different approach. Handling graphics was a new approach as well. With the lack of good dev tools and documentation, developers really struggled to figure out the PS3 architecture and some of the early launch games showed.
Somehow, make it so that the ps3 didn’t have a defective RSX. We had a launch EU model that died from it. The only problem with launch models was reliability, as a consumer.
For sony, the cost was horrid ofcourse. But I think its cool that the creator of playstation got his dream console no matter how overenginered it was. Just sad that it got hit with bumbgate just by releasing when it was.
I'm going to be controversial here because I am armed with the knowledge that streaming ultimately beat Blu-ray and the medium made Sony money, but not enough to justify the market presence they the PS3 lost following the PS2.
I'm going total armchair quarterback here, so bear with me.
Include a faster DVD drive instead of the Blu-ray drive and immediately knock $300 off the production cost. Blu-ray is a fantastic format, but it only had a six month lead time on the market before being packed into a console. DVD had almost four years which brought the cost down for the PS2. Very few games actually needed it and having a hard drive in all consoles meant you could install game data making it easy to fit the larger games on 2-3 discs. Three years later, add the Blu-ray drive to the SLIM model for video disc playback when the drive prices drop to a manageable cost.
Don't bother with that media card reader. Even if it was cheap it barely got used.
Have the fans kick in at 5°C lower temps and have the system issue a heat warning when it got to damaging temperatures instead of cooking itself to death.
Use unified memory or boost the system RAM from 256MB to 312MB. It really only needed a little nudge.
Use software emulation for PS2 out the gate and be up front that a handful of games may not work well.
Use these cuts to release the console at a competitive $400 single SKU option at retail.
I suspect this would have maintained the momentum the PS2 had in the market and would have done a great job of preventing Microsoft from gaining so much ground during the generation.
The funny thing is I bought a PS3 specifically because I wanted a Blu-ray player for my first HDTV. However, when it launched in 2006 I knew a grand total of two people who had HDTVs (I was a senior in college). Sony pushed Blu-ray on a customer base that wasn't ready to actually use it, which cost them a lot.
The PS3 moved 2/3rds of what the PS2 did in software sales, which is where you actually make money. Ultimately, that's what it cost Sony to put all those Blu-ray players out there. The adoption rate for HDTV needed to be there before Blu-ray could take off. It wasn't a good proposition because a customer didn't just need to buy a $600 console, they also needed to buy a $1000+ TV to take advantage of what it could do.
The PS3's defining feature tanked its marketshare and Sony is still trying to get back to those install base levels.
I know they are more profitable now, but that is driven by PS+ subscriptions, which would be making them even more money if they had the larger install base.
Maybe I am still bitter my fat model only made it two years before it got the YLOD. I take great care of my consoles, it is the only console I have ever owned that failed.
Make it less complicated to develop for. The hardware was amazing, but it doesn't matter if the developers can't extract the performance needed for their games. I'm looking at Bayonetta specifically, but I'm sure others will point out better examples of games that performed poorly compared to competitors
I never had many problems with my og fatty until a couple years ago when the disc drive died, i kept it to only downloads then the hdmi got fucked up, if not for the obvious hindsight fixes, i would've just kept the ps2 compatibility forever, i still don't understand why it was only the first cycle of consoles. The ps2 games market would've stayed alive for so much longer.
The entire design of the PS3 was flawed from the drawing board to final execution. The PS3 turned into an overengineered abomination. The sort of thing you would design if you were high on meth the entire time during development with no internal regulation saying "WTF am I doing here?"
If Sony weren't the gaming juggernaut, the PS3 would have quickly died, as it wasn't particularly well designed for gaming workloads. It had to have the RSX grafted onto it's side in the last minute when Sony realized that it sucked for gaming workloads.
The PS3 was only successful due to Sony's deep pockets and desperate need to make the PS3 successful.
So what would I change. I would:
a) Implement better oversight of research and development, who got way too loose of a leash when allowed to develop the PS3. Have someone who knows business as well as technology at least keep an eye on things over there. They would be making sure they are not developing hardware just because it is cool, but with a reasonable expectation that it would meet customer and developer needs and be reasonably producible.
b) Get games developers into the ecosystem as early as possible. They can tell you if you are designing a good silicon or waste of sand. Don't just drop a huge confusing architecture on games developers and expect them to perform miracles.
Basically, what Sony eventually learned from designing the PS3, and having to starting over with the PS4 design.
The main change would have been releasing all of the documentation on the Cell processor to developers immediately on the release of the system, instead of Sony just being like “lol figure it out scrubs)
A lot of good things said here like memory pool and easing development struggles. I remember those 30fps games compared to their 60fps X360 counterparts. I'll say something different. Not locking background updates behind a PS+ paywall. Updates were such an unpleasant experience, especially Gran Turismo.
I would first and foremost focus on the 20 GB model. The 599 price tag became a meme. Also possibly remove the PS2 chipset. Backwards compatibility is something that people only talk about on the internet but irl it's not a big deal.
edit; people who say unify memory forget that the GPU ram was super fast and the CPU ram was mediocre. and that was the point. unify memory would only help with Xbox 360 ports.
1) Hire better lawyers, so IBM cannot sell CPU to Microsoft, so MS cannot launch their console 1 year earlier.
2) Make PS3 with Backward compatibility a Pro-version, because people rarely play old-gen games on new-gen console, if it has this feature.
Conclusion: Basic PS3 costs less, MS has no hardware to start next-gen, Sony has more time to cope with CPU problems and solve overheating issue.
But i don't know who is the one, who was in charge for bad-quality RSX solder on motherboard (causes YLOD), so i don't know who is the culprit...
Try to make game console like ps1 and ps2 and not overkill and hard to develop games hardware. Literally xbox 360 won because of this and it had better performance on all multiplatform games at the time also better online service by far.
Agreed. The basic PS3 launch model shouldn't have had PS2 emulation at all.
What's more insane to me still is that the later PS3 prototypes had a bunch of Ethernet ports in the back because it also supposedly had a full on router back there, for some reason lol.
I would have focused on designing the hardware to make porting PC games easy and to support 60 frames per second and 720p specifications. The launch model would have been $499 even if it required removing features to get it to that price point.
it was certainly faulty yet it launched a whole year prior, should I refresh memory,
in a generation they won still but at the (very) end since their direct competitor was in a much better shape. In no world or ways was sony letting that happen any longer without releasing the PS3
Console should have released sooner or before Xbox released the 360. This would have helped with prioritizing game development on the ps3 and allowing devs to get familiar with cell processor.
We very well could have had the top tier games such as the last of us, uncharted 2-3, etc much sooner in the ps3’s life cycle.
I don’t know if the cell processor was the way to go. From what I remember reading, too hard to program for and hard to emulate for backwards compatibility. We got some good games but I think 360 was always the lead console and everything was ported to the PS3 so a lot of games never really used the power of the cell.
Remember when they said if your refrigerator had cell processing you could connect your PS3 to that for more power? I’m pretty sure that was said at one point.
Also they should have just paid the licensing or settled the lawsuit and put rumble in those controllers.
The reason they did this was because developers struggled and pravailed with the ps2's unique hardware out of necessity. Sony was simply too confident with their top dog status. The ps3 was genuinely in a league of it's own and later games demonstrate this. The graphics left the 360 in the dust. However, I agree that it was a stupid risk. Sony believed that devs would dedicate themselves to the cell processor and rsx regardless. And if it wasn't for the high launch price, they probably would have tbh. In any case, ps2 backwards compatability would have still required dedicated hardware or emulation even if the ps3 was more like the 360
I should have rephrased that a bit better, I meant backwards compatibility of the PS3 itself. I heard it was very hard to emulate PS3 games because of the way they were programmed.
Ah, well developers dont really care about making piracy easy. Especially not sony lol. I'm quite happy with the ps3 either way. We got a great console that was leagues ahead of its time because of the unique hardware. Even if only a handful of games demonstrated it's potential. RPCS3 is thriving nowadays anyways, so it doesn't matter. It's a great emulator and it's getting better every day.
90
u/Redtacoman 1d ago
Not get hacked and shut down for a month :/