If someone actually makes PS5 accept pirated games, I expect a boom to PS5 sales.
I believe a good reason why the PS2 was so dominant was because of how widespread PS2 piracy was.
I believe a good reason why the PS2 was so dominant was because of how widespread PS2 piracy was.
Just think! All your CDs and movies in one machine, that you can play on your big rear projection TV over your 5.1 surround speakers!
Just think! They had absolutely no intention of releasing a version that was actually a PS2 with wireless controllers, and indeed thought the very idea that anyone would buy such a thing was laughable.
That would have blown the market to pieces.
PS3 was originally PS2 backward compatible, then they removed that feature to shave a few bucks off the BOM.
However, once these countries developed further and the people who grew up with PS consoles started to make more money, guess which consoles and games these people decided to buy? Hint: it wasn’t Xbox!
Long story short, easy access to piracy was a gateway to future PS game sales in many developing countries.
I absolutely assure you no one, ever, bought original games in those countries. Especially not the (relatively) rich who could afford them.
DVD playback wasn't a selling point. No one had DVDs back then. Everyone watched xvid on their PC. That was the only way to obtain digital movies. DVD stores were very minimal and saw no attention. Rentals were mostly VHS.
I also bought PS3 before Hotz by the way. Over the span of 2 years I bought like 3 games I cared about the most, that's all I could afford with the money I had available as a kid. After the jailbreak I had some 20 titles.
Any theoretical PS5 piracy would almost certainly require it to be completely disconnected from the Internet so that the firmware and operating system could not be updated (or verified by Sony).
I always find that interesting, because to my eyes the quality jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is the biggest we've ever seen (and likely ever will see) in home video formats, way bigger than the move from VHS to DVD. I don't think DVD has aged particularly well, especially in a world of non-interlaced digital flat panel displays. A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service, but DVD generally looks worse than your typical 480p stream.
Some DVDs are poorly mastered, and modern encodings are better than mpeg2 at the same bitrate, but 480p DVD should compare well to bandwidth limited 480p streaming.
Also, DVDs were fundamentally very different from VHS, while Blu-Ray is just the same thing but incrementally better (yes, I know it's pretty different in a lot of important ways, but it looks very nearly the same, and you use it the same way).
DVDs introduced or normalized:
1) Surround sound on home media.
2) Widescreen picture (widescreen VHS existed, as did pan-n-scan DVD, but DVD popularized home widescreen video sources)
3) "Extras"—sure, you'd see the odd making-of feature on a second tape with some VHS releases, or available separately, but nothing like e.g. commentary tracks.
4) Multiple audio options from one piece of media (original audio plus dubs on foreign media)
5) Nice-looking captioning, potentially in multiple languages, not like ugly VHS/TV CC managed by the TV.
6) No rewinding.
7) Chapters & menus.
8) ... probably more that I'm forgetting about.
Plus they didn't degrade every time you played them (provided you didn't scratch them when handling the disk) and pretty much never self-destructed in the player.
Granted, Laserdisc did some of this too, but it was too expensive and too bulky and ~nobody had one. I'm not even sure more than half the population of the US knew laserdisc existed.
Meanwhile, Blu-Ray brought us... more pixels. And the disks are more durable. A few other features, sure, but only nerds know about those, really. That's about it. The pixel-count increase was big, but it wasn't a whole new thing.
In short: DVD was a new thing; Blu-Ray was "just" better DVD. Consider: almost nobody called a DVD a tape. Tons of people still call Blu-Rays "DVDs".
Whatever the technical merits of Blu-Ray over DVD, it simply didn't make as big a splash. Probably didn't help that streaming services were starting to make non-film-geeks reconsider having a home video library at all, early in Blu-Ray's lifespan.
> A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service,
Heh, especially Netflix. Encoding artifacts everywhere. Every dark scene is a bunch of big squares. Terrible, terrible picture. I can get 2GB(!) h.265 blu-ray rips @ 1080p that look way better than Netflix's 1080p. The problem is they're (streaming services generally, that is) incentivized to make the stream as bad as they possibly can, without driving away too many customers, because storage and data transfer costs are major expenses for them.
This. DVD arrived back in the CRT-era when most screens were both smaller and had lower resolution than modern screens. When Blu-ray hit the market, 32"+ flatscreens had started to become mainstream.
If you try watching a Bluray on a 24" CRT TV then you'd hardly notice the difference when comparing to a high-quality DVD release.
If S-VHS had ever caught on for commercial releases, then the jump might have been smaller, but a VHS was visibly worse even on screens of the time, and screens were getting bigger pretty fast back then.
I still say if SEGA went DVD with the Dreamcast we'd have a totally different console scene, but I'm also a huge SEGA fangirl, so what can I say.
I have no doubt that viable piracy improves hardware sales in less fortunate economies, I just don't think it's enough of an effect to have the dramatic impact on global sales that was implied above.
If you want a console whose global sales I think were driven in large part by piracy, look no further than the PSP.
1: https://www.vgchartz.com/charts/platform_totals/Hardware.php...
Buying one from USA.
Sometimes even flying to USA, buying the console and flying back is cheaper than buying local.
And during the PS2 era, everyone I knew that owned a PS2, bought it from a shop that sold modchipped PS2 that they bought from smugglers that got it from USA.
Currently I see that with the Switch, of the people I know that own a game console, most of the time is a Switch, and most of the time is a pre-modded Switch imported from USA, usually an old hardware version with Atmosphere installed, because modchipped Switches are buggy.
edit: Also all of them were modchipped, you could take any console to any random electronics repair shop to get it modded.
In the old days, all you wanted and could do was play games so stakes were low. Now you have Netflix, NFL, and years of digital “goods” tied in there.
I do agree with you that piracy played a big part on PS1, and PS2 success but the role of it in the modern day won’t be as important as in the past.
The PS5 became profitable in 2021.