PlayStation 3 retrospective – The Good, the Bad, and its continuing mission

Free online gaming

It seems like a distant memory now, but in an age where even Nintendo is charging you to game online, we long for the days of being able to sign into absolutely any game and play with our friends for free. The previous console generation is where online gaming really started to take off, and this was key in Sony’s ace in the hole over Microsoft. You had to pay for Xbox Live, you didn’t have to pay for PlayStation Network.

I mean, you even had to pay online to play Phantasy Star Online and World of Warcraft at the time! But nope, Sony kept its basic online services absolutely free throughout the course of this console’s lifetime.

Mic drop!

Instant Game Collection and Sales

Eventually, Sony was forced to start charging some people for online services since it started to leak money. That’s how PlayStation Plus came into being, and while it is a requirement now, there once was a time when gamers had the option to pay for Sony’s online network.

Why would any sane gamer want to do that? Well, if you pay for PlayStation Plus, you get free stuff! The PlayStation 3 is where Instant Game Collection came around, soundly adding to our backlog every month and making us feel the weight of modern gaming on our shoulders.

I would say this is more important, but Sony also ripped the idea of weekly sales straight from Steam at a time when Valve was raking in huge dollars from heavy price cuts. The PlayStation Store through PlayStation 3 made sales a staple of console gaming, a fixture that remains intact today.

Excellent exclusives, artsy fartsy indies

While it was the Xbox 360 that actually got the indie ball rolling through the Xbox Live Arcade and even the artsy fartsy movement going with Braid, Sony’s indie initiative picked up and ran with the concept in ways that Microsoft didn’t. The result was PlayStation becoming the preferred console platform for indie developers, which kind of carries over into our current console generation.

No game better fits this section than thatgamecompany’s Journey, a game which rocked critics and gamers alike when it launched in 2012. That was followed by The Unfinished Swan the next year, and then it became obvious what Sony was aiming for.

Both consoles can claim supremacy when it comes to exclusives, too. For every Gears of War there was a Resistance, and for every Halo there was an Uncharted. Even the fabulous Crackdown found an answer in Sony’s inFamous. In the closing years of the generation, I give the PlayStation 3 the edge thanks to The Last of Us, sticking to its guns even after the hype for the succeeding console had gotten underway.

Filling that Japanese niche

This was instrumental in helping the PlayStation 3 regain lost ground after a terrible first year. In 2008, a string of excellent games made their way to the console that helped attract gamers who loved the PlayStation 2’s helping of terrific Japanese games. It’s no secret that Microsoft didn’t thrive on its exclusivity deals and that Japanese developers were drying up at the time.

In response, PlayStation 3 threw Metal Gear Solid IV into our faces but, more importantly, cranked out the revolutionary sleeper hits Demon’s Souls and Valkyria Chronicles to prove that Japanese developers indeed had what it took to keep up with the booming Western AAA market. These games towered over Microsft’s early Japanese attempts with Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.

From there, both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation shared hits like Final Fantasy XIII, Dark Souls, and Catherine, and Japanese games started to find their footing again.

Delivering Blu-ray to us at a reasonable price

In the spirit of the PlayStation 2 and how it effectively got DVDs into our houses at a relatively cheap cost, the PlayStation 3 provided a nice alternative to a standard Blu-ray player at the time, which was still astronomical in price.

The PlayStation 3 was by no means cheap, but with the ability to act as both a Blu-ray player and a game console, it provided an alternative path to making Blu-ray the preferred format of its format war with HD-DVD.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/03/17/playstation-3-retrospective-the-good-the-bad-and-its-continuing-mission/