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Sony Ships Its Last Ever PlayStation 3 In Japan (engadget.com)
After 11 years, Sony has stopped shipping the PlayStation 3 to retailers in Japan. The country stopped production on the 500GB model in December last year, but now a recent update on PlayStation Japan's website suggests that the other lingering units have all been shipped as well. It's only a matter of time before the console stops being produced altogether in other parts of the world. Engadget reports:
Selling over 70 million units in just seven years, the PlayStation 3 was certainly a console to be reckoned with. Yet, for all its achievements, the long-surviving gaming machine initially made a name for itself for all the wrong reasons. With Sony riding high on the PlayStation 2's market-leading sales numbers, its successor launched at the eye-watering price of $499 -- and consumers weren't too happy about it. Luckily for Sony, publishers stuck with the pricey console, and exclusive games like Uncharted, Heavy Rain, The Last Of Us and Metal Gear Solid 4 helped to right the course of Sony's initially water-riddled ship. With the sun-setting on the aging console in the East, the news doesn't bode well for the future of the PlayStation 3 across the rest of the world. Sony has previously announced that PS Now will soon move exclusively to PS4 and PC. While few players will be mourning the loss of the pricey service, there are many PS3 owners still benefitting from free games on PlayStation Plus and downloading new content from the PS Store. As Sony slowly begins to start winding the console down, it's unlikely that gamers will be able to continue to use these services for much longer on the aging gaming system.
Good riddance.
Other than having an existing PS3 games library, is there any other reason to buy a new PS3 even after the PS4 came out?
As the PS3 becomes "retro", the DRM in PS3 means as consoles die games will be lost forever. In 2040 you'll still be playing Super Mario World, but not The Last of Us.
Speaking of which, it would be nice if their last patch before ditching the console did re-enable the "other os" option, this time with the hyper visor officially giving access to all resources.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and check out SSF & Yabause. Last I checked they got After Burner Climax running on it. Which is nice since you can't buy the game anymore when the F-14 Tomcat license ran out (which sucks)
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Missing from the overview are the people that bought PS3's as a cheap BluRay player and those that used clusters of PS3's running linux.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
That and they already payed out millions (in theory anyway) as part of a class action lawsuit for disabling the feature. If they dug in their heels that hard, there's no way they're going to re-enable it.
The summary talks about the PS3's "eye-watering" price, and its gaming legacy. However, it's more important contribution in tech history was the introduction of Blu-ray. Sure, Blu-ray didn't originate with the PS3, but other than a handful of $1000, stand-alone players, the PS3 was the route that Blu-ray took into the living room. For several years, the PS3 was the top-rated Blu-Ray player (in terms of features, speed, ease-of-use, etc.), and cost the same or less than stand-alone players. Some remember that a competing format, HD-DVD, was introduced around the same time. The success of the PS3 was the biggest single contributor (though not the only one) to Blu-ray winning that format war.
Another PS3 footnote in history was its use of the Cell processor: a Power core with several highly parallelized co-processors and coherent shared memory, which gave it exceptional physics and rendering capabilities (for the time). Sure, it never really caught on as an architecture, but it was something new and interesting at a time when processor technology was just a pissing match between Intel and AMD each doing x64.
I'm about ready to stop visiting Slashdot after coming here since this site started.
Huh? I've been on Slashdot for 15 years, and they've had trolls like that as long as I've been here. Not defending them, but they're hardly new.
The GNAA thing must be at least ten years old by now, and "penis bird" is even older than that IIRC.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Why even bother? At this point for most practical purposes something like a Raspberry Pi is a much better hardware.
Why is there homebrew community for DreamCast, NeoGeo, and even older (Megadrive, etc.) consoles when a modern Pi will pack more power than any of them ?
Because some people have fun tinkering with hardware.
Some people actually enjoy the intellectual challenge on trying to make something work on constrained hardware.
(See the demoscene on very old machines: 8-bits computers like C64, original IBM PC, etc.)
OtherOS was shut down by Sony on the grounds of helping piracy.
Now that they won't produce anymore official content, there's less impact of potential piracy and would make the home-brew/tinkerer communities happier.
But as mentioned by others : fat chance. Sony seems to be as much anti-opening as possible.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
They double-extra won't ever give it to you with a hypervisor which gives access to all resources, but the truth is that Other OS made it too easy to rip Blu-Ray.
How so ?
I vaguely understand the logic behind the game piracy scare :
- apparently some frustrated tinkerer found an unofficial way around the hypervisor limitations, and that would in theory open up way to devise solution to run commercial games under OtherOS without the copy protection kicking in.
But how would a PS3 running OS help ripping Blurays differently than a USB3 Bluray drive connected to a laptop ?
Or did you meant "ripping the encryption key out of the player's RAM" ? (something along the way of : play Bluray in console, then switch to otherOS, dump the memory, search the memory for the AACS key)
Disclaimer : I'm a bit out of touch with the whole "ripping" thing, since I last did backups of important DVD with K9Copy and DVDShrink.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Re-enable the "Other OS" boot option and kiss it goodbye.
Nah, won't happen...
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
You can upgrade the hardware piece by piece as you see fit: Now a hard drive, then a new GPU, later a newer mobo+CPU+RAM, etc.
Also, so far, it's been much better than the consoles in preserving backwards compatibility. In a modern PC with Windows you can play most games made in the last 10 years, many in the last 20. The rest of them (ok,. I'm sure some you can't) you can run in a VM on the original OS for which they were designed.
Of course, it has bad things. For me, the biggest one is that you're tied to Windows and at the mercy of Microsoft. Never it's been more evident than now where the current Windows is an anti consumer piece of spyware.
The consoles are simpler and easier to use but for me a PC wins overall