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In Japan, PlayStation 2 Ends a 12-Year Run
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."
There's more to dominating the market than installed base - as I said in my original post, the Wii managed PS2-style sales in its early years, but never really dominated the scene.
I think the thing with the 360 and PS3 has been that, from the user's point of view, they're probably more interchangable than any other two consoles in history. Their internal architectures might be completely different, but in terms of overall performance, they come out in about the same place. In a technical sense, if a game can run on the 360, it can be made to run on the PS3 and vice-versa. Just as importantly, they've got controllers which, while different in appearance, basically have the same number and configuration of buttons. So the same game can be released for both platforms in a near-identical state.
There aren't as many exclusives as in previous generations and nor are those exclusives as likely to be "best in genre" as they have been in the past. Even developers who started out this generation tied to one manufacturer's hardware have branched out since into cross-platform (eg. Insomniac).
So whether you buy a 360 or a PS3 (or if you own both, which one you spend most time with) is likely to be influenced by some distinctly secondary factors. Do you believe in "patriotic" buying? I suspect a lot of people do, as evidenced by the PS3's advantage in Japan and the 360's in the US (while Europe remains a dead heat). Which controller do you prefer the ergonomic fit of? Which console do most of your friends own? These are much narrower factors than the essentials that set apart the Xbox and the Gamecube, the SNES and the Genesis/Megadrive and the Playstation and the N64.
I don't think this console generation has had a winner. The Wii took an early lead but squandered it (check Nintendo's financials for the last couple of years, as opposed to the specifically gaming divisions of Sony and MS). The 360 and PS3 have remained neck and neck. And the Wii-U (which feels as much a current-gen console as a next-gen one based on the time I've had with mine)... who knows?
I do wonder what would have happened if Sony had held back the PS3 for 6-9 months, to work out some of the oddities in the hardware, let the launch price fall, get a stronger launch-lineup and maybe get proper back-compatibility into the hardware as a standard across the world.
Possibly, something entirely unrelated to the console market - HD-DVD may have become the de facto standard for high-def media. Upgrading their console platform was only one reason Sony launched the PS3 - the other was to get a player for their proprietary high-def format in the lounge room of as many consumers as possible. Remember, at launch, the PS3 was the most cost-effective BluRay player on the market, due to console subsidies.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"They originally planned not to need a GPU because Cell was supposed to have enough FP power to do the 3D graphics all by itself but that turned out not to be the case."
Please stop parroting crap from the Beyond3D forums.
Our company is large enough to have had access to the PS3 hardware designs at a very early stage and were in a dialog with Sony engineers about the design. At no time did the PS3 have any other design than what is in the shipping hardware today. The only things that were to be determined were clockspeeds, number of SPUs, etc.
Not only is that stupid lie started on the Beyond3D forums false, it doesn't even make sense. The PS2 and PS3 have almost identical hardware designs. That is the feedback we console developers gave to Sony - we want a PS2 taken to the next level. Which is exactly what the PS3 was and is.
I have no idea what company you worked for, but the PS3 hardware design went through a radical change between its early stage incarnation and what shipped. You must have worked for a late-access company.
Originally, the PS3 was going to do most of it's graphics in a souped-up 12-bit fixed point PS2-like graphics pipeline (called the RS) and do all the geometry on the Cell processors. After they found out their fixed point design was untenable for modern fragment shading, they had a crash program to retro-fit floating point into the RS-core, but that program failed. Then they called Nvidia in a panic to cram in a souped up NV47 GPU core into the chip (called the RSX).***
The PS2 and PS3 have in no way an "almost identical" HW design. In fact the preview-dev-kits that Sony shipped prior to the HW being available were basically Power-PCs with NV47's in them. The NV47 GPU architecture is not at all like the PS2 GPU. The Power-PC was not like the Mips-R5900 core used in the PS2 either (not to mention the cell processor alti-vec on steriods hanging off the power-pc cores in the PS3.
Early PS3's had PS2 chips in them because it was too hard to emulate the PS2 on the Power-PC+RSX combo. As a cost-reduction move, later PS3's had huge patch libraries for popular games on the hard-drive to live-patch games to make this emulation work. Finally, Sony gave up and the latest PS3's don't run old PS2 games at all.
It's true at the end they sacrificed two SPUs (one for a security monitor and another to increase yield) and there were some clock tweaks, but that was waaaay late in the PS3 development program.
***Actually Sony wanted a custom version of the new Nvidia G80-core (w/ unfied shaders), but Nvidia wouldn't agree to modify that chip into a core in the short amount of time they had to execute the program, so Sony only got the previous generation graphics core (at least it was floating point pixel shaders).