The PS2 era was without a doubt the most glorious Sony has ever experienced. It’s not for nothing that the Japanese company boasts that the system is the best-selling system of all time in the industry, but the perspective has changed dramatically since Landing ps3.
And the console came out a year later than the Xbox 360, its price was crazy, Sony only added to the losses with each sale, and developers had real problems creating games for the machine. Former brand manager Sean Layden reflected on those times in an interview with Eurogamer, making it clear that it all started on the wrong side.
“From a development perspective, things like the Emotion Engine at the heart of the PlayStation 2 and the Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 were the biggest headaches at the time. Learning to develop these proprietary architectures required acquiring new skills to get most of them, Naughty Dog always found a way to get the most out of the technology before anyone else.
That’s why PlayStation’s own games always look better on their consoles: it’s the only thing they work on, and they just need to know the technology. This gave the PS2 and PS3 particular advantages, although it took time for others to catch up. But it wasn’t always positive; It was a real headache and entailed huge costs. “The PS3 hardware took a long time to become profitable, a very long time, whereas with the launch of the PS4, it was practically a non-profitable product from day one.”
Sony was so confident in the potential of the Cell processor for the PS3 that it thought it could bring the technology to competitive in the market like Intel, Nvidia and AMD processors. “But that didn’t happen. And without that, all the expected effects of the scale of the technology were adversely affected because you couldn’t make enough of them fast enough,” Layden explains.
All of these issues have been very serious in the stability of the PlayStation, to the point where the person in charge states that “PS3 was the Icarus moment for Sony. We had PS1, PS2… and now we’re building a supercomputer! And we’re going to deliver on his Linux and we will do everything! We are flying too close to the sunand we were lucky and blessed to have had that experience, but it taught us a lot.”
Taking these lessons into account, the arrival of the PS4 meant that console components would be sourced from external suppliers as in-house architectures unbalanced budgets. Ultimately, the PS3 went on to sell 87 million units worldwide.
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