Hi everyone, the last time you heard from me, I talked about the huge milestone that PlayStation 2 achieved – reaching 50 million units sold in North America. Today I’m excited to talk about another milestone in PlayStation 2’s lifespan. For the first time ever, PlayStation 2 will be offered at a price point under $100 (that’s $99.99 MSRP, to be exact), starting April 1!
Why is this so significant? Well most importantly, this new price means that more people than ever will be able to join in on the fun that so many of you PlayStation 2 owners have been enjoying for years, which means new families will become part of the platform’s record-breaking install base. With this new price, we intend to introduce a new generation of consumers – some of whom weren’t even alive when the system was first introduced in 2000 – to the immense entertainment value offered by PlayStation 2.
In the gaming industry, the typical lifecycle for a console is around five years, but because we build each of our platforms for a large and diverse consumer base, we design our platforms differently. With the original PlayStation and now PlayStation 2, we’ve proven that consumers can rely on our platforms for their gaming and entertainment needs for at least a decade. This speaks to the technology and features that were packed into PlayStation 2 from the beginning, as well as to the ongoing support the platform enjoys from the publishing and retail communities and, well, all of you fans.
PlayStation 2’s unmatched gaming library will grow to nearly 1,900 titles from both our first-party studios and publishing partners this year, with a particular focus on the social and sports genres that are so popular with the emerging family demographic. This will include games such as MLB ’09, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Guitar Hero Metallica and MotorStorm: Arctic Edge…not to mention the 250 titles that have achieved “Greatest Hits” status. With all of that content, PlayStation 2 is a great option for families looking for ways to share their entertainment experiences together; they can rock out to Rock Band, test their trivia knowledge with Buzz!, or simply use the PlayStation 2 as their DVD or CD player.
So to everyone who’s enjoyed PlayStation 2 over the years, thanks for your continued support. And to those who will now be joining the PlayStation family, welcome!
Nice…
Welcome new Playstation gamers. It’s now cheaper to become part of the community.
Enjoy!
Congrats, this is cool.
I was hoping for a more interesting announcment- geared toward the PS fanbase… most of us have had (sometimes 2 or 3) PS2s since launch day. Still, that’s a great deal. Even though I’m one of the extremely lucky PS3 owners with full backwards compatibility, I may pick up a PS2 for my kids. I already have some excellent software…
I wish I had more hands…
So I could give this announcement…
Four thumbs down!
thats great Sony im glad i will telling the cheap ass parents this so they wont corrupt their kids will Wiis, but you shouldnt have let the other blogs have this annoucement in advance definitely since they uncovered it earlier than you giving it to them
now i want somebody to actually step and say something about or to the ps3 and psp owning masses before [DELETED] gets out of hand with this, this like saying “we’re all about clinton 90’s admin of handling things” from Obama and not giving a excuse why we would do that
thanks for the years and products Sony
I’m thinking about purchasing a Playstation 2, so I could play some of the older Ratchet titles. Does the PS2 have online?
Playstation 2 born (purchased) in 2001, still alive and kicking. Have a Hard Drive, but someone stole my network adapter.
I received Kingdom Hearts for x-mas and I still play Guitar Hero I, II, and (sometimes) III.
Although my PS3 is the Big Boss of consoles in my home, I still enjoy going back to the MASSIVE PS2 catalog. I just wish I could save space on the E-Stand by playing my PS2 games on my PS3.
$100 seems a bit much after so long, but the system was still selling great a $130, so I see why you guys set the price where it is.
Congrats to Sony and the PS2 for its amazing achievements. The Wii is a great family console, but PS2 has a better library and price.
Great, now all those buyers who have been waiting 10 years for the price to drop to $100 will finally buy their PS2s! Could SCEA possibly be stupider?
…but I should add that we are in need of another PS3 in the house. I think the price point is more than fair, but if it were a little lower, we could afford it sooner! :)
gcube, do you really understand what little sense you make? “come on ps3 $299 i would buy 2 hurry up ill change my mind” You realize that with the $600+ you would be spending on just the consoles, which I don’t even want to know why you’d need two consoles, but you could buy a console and a few games and an extra controller. I bought my 40GB PS3 for $280 on ebay and put a 250GB HDD in it for another $80, in both cases, I already saved money compared to not only current prices, but your demanded price drop.
For everybody throwing a little hissy fit about the supposed “big announcement” being merely a PS2 price drop, please try to think before you speak. First of all I don’t remember Sony ever promising a big announcement today; it certainly wasn’t on this blog. There was a RUMOR of a big announcement on websites like joystiq, but why should you get mad at Sony because somebody else posted a rumor that didn’t come to fruition the way you wanted it to. The bottom line is that it is stupid to get mad at Sony for lowering the price of one of their products just because it didn’t happen to be the product you wanted it to be. The fact that people’s expectations weren’t met is irrelevant because people shouldn’t have had those expectations in the first place.
Wow sony. Thats not news at all. Everyone has a ps2. You should tell us about updates on ps3 alot sooner then the day before its released!
Sony keeps saying that in the long run the ps3 will turn around, but the problem is in the long run the ps3 may become irrelevant. The next x box and wii will come out and the ps3 will look old to consumers. In order to avoid that fate sony NEEDS to make the ps3 relevant as soon as possible. Rrrr…the situation sony is in makes me regret buying stock in the company:(
I don’t want to seem like a complainer, but this better not be the “BIG ANNOUNCEMENT” for today. Sony has to drop the price on the PS3 if they want to compete. The Wii, has sold over 50 million units in 2 and 1/2 years, and that’s something that took the PS2 more than double that time. I have a 60gb launch PS3 with backwards compatibility, so i can give a crap less about a PS2 price drop. A bunch of my friends on the other hand aren’t as fortunate and after coming over and checking out Killzone are waiting for this drop. With all the rumors swirling around online about an impending drop, I’m sure sales the past month or so have been hurting because everyone is holding out at this point. Sony better start doing the right thing, so they can reclaim some of their old fans back from Microsoft.
Oh and if there isn’t something coming today, what’s with this new SKU?
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/17/target-receives-new-ps3-sku-to-release-after-gdc/
@205 davivman- As a business, you are 100% responsible for not meeting expectations, regardless of wether they should have existed in the first place. That’s how business works.
Pre-announcing that they were going to have a announcement today made it sound like something signifigant was going to happen… thus they set an unrealistic expectation. This kind of poor business sense has run rampant in SCEA since the PS3s launch and is going to have to stop if they want to achieve any form of success this generation.
How about an update someone cares a crap about?
You make it like you have this huge groundbreaking announcement and you say something no one gives a damn about. Are you people just that stupid?
Don’t you think you should be the slightest bit concerned that a bag of crap from the garden store sells better than the ps3 at this point in time?
Do you guys even care about the ps3? Are you people on drugs?
Are slim PS2s $100? I have the original PS2 but are the Slims the same price?
@HouseMorton, that’s why I vote for, keep it quiet before the announcement and then blow it out without anyone have to make predictions before the announcement. Without blogs / sites that make their money for posting any kind of rumor no matter how false they are, being fed with nonsense and without your fans being disappointed.
Sounds like a great deal to me, doesn’t it?
Hey you wanna know how else you can bring in more people onto the PS2 GIVE US BACK BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY!!!
There is no reason any of us should have to settle for wired controllers, complete disconnect form PSN, memory cards, or 480i visuals when we have a PS3 that can upscale and negate all of those issues.
It’s nice you guys are so happy for your casual gamer audience, but I want to see sony make the PS3 the system that appeals to all. IT’s YEAR 3 FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!! PS3 should be the system everyone wants even casuals.
dear john, i hope that u are reading these comments. b/c after reading the 1st 25 or so they all seem to be the same, and no need to read the last 175. but here it is, not many ppl care about the PS2 price cut, how about a PS3 price cut ehh? i paid $600 on launch and honestly dont care, but all my friends say they cant afford it, so BITE THE BULLET and cut the price. and btw this big announcement sucked if u didnt get the hint
@211 Onna- Absolutely, but I’d like to stress it’s not the fault of the Blogs (i.e. kotaku) for reporting, but rather the fault of SCEA for pre-announcing something so essentially non-event.
By the way, SCEA, for the record- my friends who don’t have PS3s aren’t held back by the price, they are held back by the new zero-BC policy. That’s also why I haven’t bought a second one.
@208 HouseMorton – What are you talking about? Like I already said, SONY NEVER PROMISED A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. That was a rumor reported on other websites non-affiliated with Sony. I could announce right here and now that tommorow Baskin Robins is giving away free ice cream. If you are disappointed that at this time tommorow you are not eating free ice cream, don’t get mad at Baskin Robins about it, get mad at me for making that BS up.
this is such a failure of an “huge annoucement” sony
that’s a lot of games, 1900.
You know, until today I believed that the PlayStation fanbase was a bit more mature and well spoken than the 360 fanbase.
After reading the comments for this news I see I was wrong.
Come one people, are we going to go through this every single time the blogs hype something? In-game XMB was hyped months in advance and no one was happy every time we had an announcement that wasn’t that.
Now we are going through the same thing.
You know, I was hoping for something PS3 or Gran Turismo related, and I am also disappointed thsi is what it is. But I am intelligent enough to know what the PS2 means for Sony as a business and what implications this has on that.
I would like to thank the majority of commentors in here for reminding me why I don’t enjoy Home or most online multiplayer experiences.
Either learn to read through the media hype or grow up.
Wow sony tell us something we already knew…nice i really hope this wasnt the big announcement because its not that big
yes! NOW I CAN FINALLY AFFORD A PS2
@216 Either Sony told several people in the background that they were making a major announcement today, OR several different sources had accurate psychic readings. Which is more likely?
A better analogy would be this:
If you had reported accurate information on Baskin Robbins on multiple occasions, were known to have an inside line to Baskin Robbins, and you (and several other sources) told me that BR told you that tomorrow something huge was going to happen, and then the next day BR amongst great fanfaire announced that they changed their spoon color from pink to green, I’d be pissed at BR.
No one lied here, but SCEA irresponsibly set an expectation.
soooooo… this is the “ANNOUNCEMENT” world + dog has been going monkey dung over for the last few days.. the big one.. worthy of the GDC??
can someone tell me why i should care that a 9 year old console is now sub $100??
bit of a bugger for all those early PS2 adopters eh?? bet you wish you’d waited nearly a decade now..
i can only assume that everyone at sony has started injecting a cocktail of smack and LSD into their eyeballs..
On the one hand, I’m pretty disappointed that this is, presumably, the “global announcement” that was scheduled to be released today, but on the other hand it kinda IS nice that the PS2 is under $100. Still, like others have voiced, the PS2 is nearly 10yrs old, and the majority of us are waiting for next-gen information. But hey, thanks anyway.
Beyond all the hype.. who were they making this announcement to?
Who comes to the PlayStation Blog and doesn’t at the very least own a PS2?
This is the kind of announcement that should be made in Best Buy flyers in the sunday paper. Not PRE-ANNOUNCED almost a week in advanced to be detailed on the official blog to the biggest PlayStation fans.
@222
Getting your hardware at the $99 price point is important. Glad you don’t work for me. The consumer controls their own expectations for a product. Sony didn’t make this some earth changing announcement and it was never advertised as such. As GAF normally says ” All aboard the Hype train “.
The people upset are the ones that assumed too much and I think you can figure what assumption does to you.
Dear
John Koller // Director, Hardware Marketing
This is good news but I sure hope that there is some really good news coming later in the day.
awesome, ps2 might make good christmas presents for my younger cousins now!
Meh, not huge news, not great news, but news none-the-less.
@222 it doesn’t take multiple accurate psychic readings. It takes one tiny spec of information to balloon into a rumor when all of the blogs cite each other as sources. You don’t know the source of that original spec of info any more that I do. It could be some random Sony employee in the know or some random K-Mart employee with an advanced pricing sheet. It will probably never come out and that is why it is called a RUMOR. And we all know that Sony like just about ever other company out there has a policy of not responding rumors as they pop up. To get mad at Sony for not debunking a rumor when we all know Sony doesn’t comment or rumors is dumb.
To put this into perspective. Sony now has the cheapest console currently on the market with the largest library available. So it’s not $299 PS3 shocking or 2.70 with no cross game invite shocking ,but it’s a worthy announcement.
pwn’d lol
as a proud PS3 and PSP owner,I’m a bit disappointed concerning this news.
come on Sony,cut the price of the PS3 already.not everyone can fork out 399.99 dollars.
my advice to you Sony is simple,you want to increase the sales of the PS3 like never before,why?.because cutting price down asap will see the best sales on the PS3 lifecycle yet.
So Motorstorm Arctic Edge is gonna be on the ps2 as well. Smart sony. Charge $40 for the psp version and what $20 – $30 for the ps2 version. Who makes these idiotic decisions that push titles to a dying platform and make them cheaper than the psp. they wonder why the psp is barely alive. how bout u drop the psp price and make it’s “exclusives” exclusive. no one will buy a psp game when there’s a cheaper and probably better version on the ps2. damn sony its about time ur execs pulled their heads out their butts and saw what the rest of the world sees. ur gaming division is hemorraghing and the only course of action is to drop the price on a system that wont exist in stores in a year and a half.
To anyone who’s dissapointed in todays annoucement you only have yourselves to blame. Every site was predicting a PS2 price drop but for some reason you went ahead and assumed it was something else. Way to go. Now be sure to aim your anger in the right direction and blame Sony.
I am surprised why SONY has not had the foresight to steal Nintendo’s thunder by releasing a clone of Wiimote for the PS2. A new redesigned PS2 with the wiimote clone (a better one) complete with a suite of casual games packed in for 100$ less than what the Wii costs would have been a rebirth for the PS2 and would have brought much needed capital into the company.
@davivman
shut up dude. You do NOT pre-announce an announcement like this. You don’t even announce it, people just find out from retail and say ‘Oh really? Well that’s kinda neat’.
By the simple act of PRE-announcing the announcement they implied that it was something people who keep up on the industry would care about.
It’s like if a friend calls you and it goes like this:
Friend: OMG OMG OMG GUESS WHAT I JUST GOT!?!?!
You: Umm…a new car?
Friend: NO GUESS AGAIN
You: You got a PS3?
Friend: NO!! I’m at Mcdonalds and they are TOTALLY having a free cone day! Get over here STAT!!
Yeah…like that but your friend is sony and the let down is far greater.
Sony really need to move on! They should have lowered the price of the ps3 instead because that´s the future, ps2 is not.
LOL…Sony is pathetic for telling people they have an “announcement” to make on March 31st. They should have known it would get over-hyped like this. And then it turns out to be a PS2 price drop!? Anyone who cared about this announcement ALREADY HAS A PS3!!!
EPIC FAIL, SONY.
ps3 is last in next gen sales, and all they worry about is lowering the price of the ps2?
does sony even want to comete anymore?
Well, this is the big announcement! Isn’t everyone excited? Heh. It is a great milestone for SONY though…
this kinda hurts not gonna lie. wish it was PS3 price drop but its all good i guess. i hope this years AAA titles can help push the system to where it needs to be… but alas i don’t think it can at its current price point. you guys gotta figure out a way to get the price down to $300. the thing will turn into the next wee at that price!
just my 2 cents,
Lh
I can throw a stone and hit fifteen people who would sell me their PS2 for less than $50.
Move on Sony.
You guys should really have cut the price of the PS3 =/ PS2’s already like kinda old and less and less games are coming out.
Shouldn’t you guys focus on the PS Tripple more? So that more people get that and buy the various awesome games out? ^^
And on a side note, where’s the FW update XD