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In Japan, PlayStation 2 Ends a 12-Year Run

Posted by timothy on from the old-enough-for-comics dept.

The PlayStation 3 may have overshadowed it technically, but the PlayStation 2 has seniority. Now, the PS2 is being retired in Japan after nearly 13 years. That doesn't mean the games have stopped: "To this day, developers have continued to release games on the platform due to its enduring popularity, with the last title in Japan, Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin, due out in March this year."

6 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. not game by musikit · · Score: 4, Informative

    to be fair FFXI: seekers of adoulin is an expansion to the FFXI game released close to 7 years ago now. it is not a full game and can not be played seperately without buying the original title from 7 years ago.

  2. A Console Developer Looks Back by Argerich · · Score: 5, Informative

    I remember the excitement in the company when the first PS2 devkit arrived and were placed in a locked room. Only a few top engineers in the company had access to the room. People would come and stare through the glass at the devkit demos running on the screens and standing around chatting with the guys working on the PS2 hardware. And I remember the engineers holding mini seminars in one of the conference rooms diagramming out the amazing PS2 hardware architecture and how engines will be written for the hardware.

    Sony did an absolutely amazing job with the PS2 hardware design. It was a system that much resembles some finely tuned race car that has had every single bit of wasted weight trimmed from it and setup so the driver can do one single thing, drive fast. Looking back at the PS2 code for our games it is wonderful to look at just how small and straightforward the PS2 engine code is. Pack as much data into DMA packets down to the point where not a single bit is wasted. None of the wasteful lines and lines of setup code one has to go through when writing engines for a desktop PC(or a desktop PC in console case like the Xbox).

    It is no surprise Sony was able to keep the PS2 hardware viable for almost 13 years. Unmatched console hardware design and manufacturing prowess mixed with the best developer support and tools.

    And Sony treats developers better than anyone else. They've always had the mindset of tell us what you need and well make it happen. Nintendo has always been too focused on their own first party titles and have always had an underlying attitude of 'we don't really need anyone but ourselves'. And Microsoft...I don't know where to being with how bad they are with supporting developers. The fact that they managed to piss off their sole important first party developer Bungie so much that they forced Microsoft to let them leave the company is a good an indication as any of just how bad Microsoft is with supporting developers.

    1. Re:A Console Developer Looks Back by Argerich · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't even know what the hell that rambling wall of text is supposed be.

      Our company being one of the largest developers/publishers working on the original Playstation our engineers worked directly with Sony on the design of the PS2(and the PS3). The PS2 was our dream console.

      It is such an elegant machine. It was able to put out graphics that were just as good for all but a few areas like multipass rendering and AA as the Xbox while easily surpassing it in areas like frame buffer effects(one of the major reasons the Xbox couldn't handle the Metal Gear port from the PS2 without bogging down) and physics calculations for animation thanks to the insane floating point power in the PS2. And all this while the manufacturing cost of the PS2 was roughly half that of the Xbox 360.

      It really is bizarre to read someone who has never worked on a real console game spew a bunch of techno babble.

      The PS2 and PS3 are almost identical hardware designs that are almost perfectly designed to maximize graphical power with the absolute minimum hardware costs. The only exception being the Blu-Ray drive which was very new tech compared to the PS2 more mature and cheaper drive tech.

      It really is strange to hear desktop PC game programmers cry about how the PS2/PS3 isn't exactly like their desktop PC and how they can't just dump their code designed for a completely(and massively inefficient) architecture like the standard x86 desktop PC is.

      The main engine starts off on the EE/PPU. Does basic setup. Loads tasks into the VUs/SPUs. The heavy lifting tasks on the VUs/SPUs start firing away asynchronously while the main engine continues along with the less computationally heavy game code. As data in the VUs/SPUs become ready for rendering, that data is DMAed over to the GS/RSX.

      Over time you continue to maximize the parallelism going on and get to the point where all three parts of the PS2/PS3 are cranking away at their respective tasks. Thanks to the bus architecture of the PS2/PS3 this happens with a minimal amount of bus contention slowing the system down. It is always funny to hear some PC programmer or someone on the Net parroting them crying about the split bus architecture and how they can't just dump everything into one big block of memory.

      That amazing design by Sony is the PS2 was able to put out graphics that were so close to a machine that came out a year later and had components that cost roughly twice as much.

  3. Re:Titan of its generation (and replaced too early by RogueyWon · · Score: 3, Informative

    And nor has much since...

    WoW increasingly looks like an anomaly. Very few MMOs have managed to go over 1 million subscribers and stay there. Old Republic almost hit 2 million at launch, but fell off very, very rapidly.

    Having done a bit of reading since my original post, it seems FFXI managed to stay in the 500k-750k range for years and years. It's below that point now, but then, it's extremely old now. While it may only have managed not much more than 1/20th of WoW's peak subscriber base, it seems to have done better than almost all of the other competition.

    Also massively better than its own successor, FF14, which remains one of the greatest MMO cock-ups of all time.

  4. Re:Take The Fanboy Goggle Off by RogueyWon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Eurogamer do some excellent "Digital Foundry" articles comparing PS3 and 360 versions of games (and where appropriate, PC and Wii-U versions as well). Let me find some links for you.

    Far Cry 3
    Need for Speed: Most Wanted
    Mass Effect 3
    Darksiders 2

    There are lots more if you want to look.

    tl;dr version - in most cases, the graphical and performance differences between PS3 and 360 "top end" games are so miniscule that you need detailed frame-by-frame comparisons to spot them. Broadly speaking, what differences do exist show the 360 having an advantage on Unreal-tech games (which is a lot of the big shooters). There are a few games which do swing heavily in favour of one platform or another (eg. Skyrim towards the 360, Final Fantasy XIII towards the PS3), but these are the exception rather than the norm and tend to reflect a developer which is much more comfortable with one set of hardware than the other.

    Neither console crushes the other in performance terms in the real world. End of.

  5. Re:Take The Fanboy Goggle Off by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Console developer here. Curiously, what you are saying is mostly false. The reality is: either you are designing the game around PS3 hardware, or PS3 version will be far worse than 360 one.

    PS3 got SPUs, and that's about it. It has less RAM, less performant GPU, and only a single hyper-threaded CPU core. Without taking SPUs into account, PS3 is essentially a castrated Xbox with 2 of its 3 cores removed and RAM halved to 256 MB (you better not touch video RAM with CPU).

    Now, what SPUs give you: 6 fast, but pretty dumb cores that see the world through 256KB window and have to DMA data in and out. Their job is mostly helping weak RSX GPU with graphics tasks (post-processing, sometimes geometry optimizations like early culling, deferred renderer - if used, etc). Using them for generic game logic is possible, but most cross-platform engines were not designed for that and SPU utilization remains a problem even now, 6 years after the launch.

    Compare the framerates of the cross-platform games, BTW.