It’s the end of an era. The PS3’s production will soon be ending in Japan, the country that’s home to Sony. After over a decade in stores, does this mean the popular system will cease production in other regions of the world too?
Releasing in November of 2006, the PS3 saw one heck of a rocky start. It had a monstrous price of $600 dollars, not many games to chose from and some very strange marketing advertisements. The price, however, was what really hurt it at launch. It did hit it stride after a few years on the market and a few price drops later.
The PS3 opened the door for some of the companies most popular games. The Uncharted series, the Last of Us, Heavy Rain, Journey, Infamous, and LittleBigPlanet are just a few of the console’s exclusive. These games still continue today on the current PS4, but the previous console definitely housed some of Sony’s biggest hitters.
There definitely were some other bumps in the PS3 road. One was the inclusion of the Move, a handheld motion control wand that was clearly a copy of Nintendo’s Wii remotes. Sony was going after the motion control market and even offered games that were strikingly similar to Wii Sports. Another issue was the defective nature of the first model of the system, the “fat” version. It was plagued with an overheating issue and caused some systems to break and get a “yellow light of death”. This actually happened to me three times. Sony decided to redesign the PS3 with a much slimmer model with better heat consumption.
It’s unknown at this time of the PS3 will be ending production across the world, but it’s safe to assume so. Even though it was a very rocky start, the system ended up being one, if not the very best console Sony ever offered. It was a massive step up in terms of hardware and ability from the console before it and paved the way for a large number of critically acclaimed video game franchises.