Ah yes, my bad. I thought that timeframe felt weird. I was only 7 or 8 when the PS2 released, and only remember watching movies on my older cousin’s system. I Should have double-checked that.
Good point on the Wii. Maybe, by then, enough other devices played DVDs for cheap that it wasn’t as much of a selling point. At the time the Wii released even dedicated portable DVD players were relatively cheap. And many other devices were combo DVD players, even SUVs started to sell with gimmicky built-in theater system upgrades.
Additionally, as successful as the Wii was with a general audience, it didn’t grab as much of the “core-gamer” audience (in my opinion) because of the gimmicky control scheme which was mandatory in most games. It also didn’t have as robust online multiplayer support as the Xbox 360 or PS3. It was also comparatively underpowered and so didn’t get ports of many popular titles.
I think appealing to both general and core audiences is key, especially now with how mainstream gaming has become. If the Wii had functional multiplayer, feature-complete ports of popular titles, and enforced a traditional control-scheme as a fallback, I think it would have outsold the PS2.
andrew@radiation.party 2 years ago
The Wii didn’t officially support dvd playback (and didn’t support hardware video decoding of typical dvd codecs, so few dvds worked with the homebrew software to enable it)