PlayStation 3 officially completed

Visitors play in the PlayStation 3 at Sony's booth, Games Convention 2007 in Leipzig

Sony has officially retired the latest 500 GB PlayStation 3 console. On the official page of this PlayStation 3 model, the “Delivery” column now says “Completed”.

Along with the PS3, many games released for this console go down in history, because they cannot be launched on the PS4. That is, if you want to play a specific game, you will need to find a used PS3 somewhere in the flea market or play through the emulator .

It has been a long story. PlayStation 3 was released in November 2006. By the way, this was the first console in the world that used Blu-ray discs as storage media. For all time, more than 80 million consoles were sold worldwide. Although at first the PS3 became famous for not-so-good things. To begin with, Sony initially set an exorbitant price of $ 499 on it, which surprised many fans. Fortunately, publishers actively supported the expensive new product - exclusive games Uncharted, Heavy Rain, The Last Of Us and Metal Gear Solid 4 were released for it, which helped the console reach a decent level of sales (70 million in the first seven years), although some predicted her a failure with such a price and other shortcomings.



It was through publishers and a selection of cool PS3 games to succeed. For example, in September 2009, the IGN portal placed PlayStation 3 only on the 15th place in the list of game consoles of all time (behind the Wii, Xbox and Xbox 360), however, PS3 outperformed its competitors in terms of the quality of the game line : it was in 2008, 2009 and 2011 years.

Everyone understood that the last day was near. This became clear back in December 2016, when Sony stopped production of the latest PlayStation 3 model. Obviously, now the stock has run out.

As you can see, Sony strictly adheres to the ten-year life cycle of consoles. Therefore, last year I began to prepare the PlayStation 3 for retirement. In October 2016, the first version of the game was released purely for PS4 without PS3 support. In February this year, the company announced that starting in August, the old PS3 will lose access to the cloud service PS Now.

PlayStation 4 is close to repeating the record of its predecessor: it has already sold 60 million units, although less than four years have passed since the start of sales, and only 20 million units have been sold over the past year. This is 2.3 million more than a year earlier (an increase due to the release of two versions of Pro and Slim). By the way, the PlayStation 3 also had a slow start, but then sales grew for several years.

Now the owners of the PS3 are gradually pushing for the purchase of a new generation of consoles. This life cycle scheme has been worked out for decades. PlayStation 3 belongs to the seventh generation of game consoles (along with the Xbox 360), and PlayStation 4 belongs to the eighth (along with the Xbox One). Let the PlayStation 3 retire, but the gaming industry continues to work like a clock.