PlayStation 3 production officially completed

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



Sony has officially withdrawn from the sale of the latest model of the PlayStation 3 500 GB game console. On the official page of this model, the PlayStation 3 in the column "Delivery" is now indicated "Completed".



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



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







It was at the expense of the publishers and the selection of cool PS3 games that were successful. For example, in September 2009, the IGN portal put PlayStation 3 only on the 15th place in the list of game consoles of all time (behind the Wii, Xbox and Xbox 360), but in terms of the quality of the PS3 games line, it won over competitors : it was in 2008, 2009 and 2011



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



As you can see, Sony strictly adheres to the ten-year life cycle of consoles. So last year, she began preparing the PlayStation 3 for retirement. In October 2016, the first version of the game was released purely for PS4 without PS3 support. In February of this year, the company announced that from August an old PS3 would 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 last 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 PS3 owners are gradually pushing to acquire a console of a new generation. This life cycle scheme has been worked out for decades. The PlayStation 3 is the seventh generation of gaming consoles (along with the Xbox 360), and the PlayStation 4 is the eighth generation (along with the Xbox One). Let the PlayStation 3 retire, but the game industry continues to work like a clock.