PS3 at 20: Sony's $600 Supercomputer and the Comeback Nobody Expected

On November 11, 2006, Sony launched the PlayStation 3 in Japan, and six days later, on November 17, in North America. The 60 GB model cost $599.99. Even the cheaper 20 GB version was $499.99. Sony was coming off the PlayStation 2, the best-selling console of all time, and many people assumed the PS3 would simply continue that run.

It did not, at least not at first. The PS3 was expensive, hard to develop for and late in Europe. Yet by the time it was retired it had sold about 87.4 million units and built one of the strongest game libraries Sony has ever had. This week it turns 20. Here is the story of the console that had to fight its way back.

A supercomputer in a living room

Sony did not want the PS3 to be just a games machine. At its heart was the Cell processor, co-developed with Toshiba and IBM, an unusual chip with one main core and several specialised helpers. It was enormously powerful when programmed well, and notoriously hard to program well.

The other big bet was Blu-ray. The PS3 was the first console to use Blu-ray discs as its main format, at a time when Blu-ray was fighting HD DVD to become the standard for high-definition films. Putting a Blu-ray drive in every PS3 helped Sony win that war. It also made the console very expensive to build.

A painful first few years

The price was only part of the problem. Estimates put the cost of making a 20 GB PS3 at about $805.85 and the 60 GB model at $840.35, well above their retail prices. Sony later acknowledged cumulative hardware losses of about $3.3 billion through mid-2008.

Europe and Australasia did not get the console until March 23, 2007, four months after the Wii, which had launched in every major region in time for the 2006 holidays. Developers struggled with the Cell, and multiplatform games often looked or ran better on the Xbox 360. For a while, Sony found itself chasing both rivals in a race it had dominated for a decade.

Things started to turn in September 2009 with the PS3 Slim, smaller, quieter and cheaper. At the same time, Sony's own studios were learning how to use the Cell, and the exclusives began to arrive.

The library that saved it

The PS3's second half was extraordinary. Naughty Dog's Uncharted games and The Last of Us, Gran Turismo 5 and a long list of Japanese and Western exclusives turned it into a console with a distinct identity. And it was home to the biggest third-party game of the generation: Grand Theft Auto V sold 29.52 million copies on PS3 alone.

Sony also used the PS3 for science. A Folding@home client, launched with Stanford University, let owners donate their console's spare processing power to research on protein folding.

The long goodbye

Production for Japan ended on May 29, 2017. Its digital store has been more stubborn. Sony announced in 2021 that the PS3 store would close, then reversed the decision after fans protested. On July 1, 2026, it finally announced the end: the PlayStation Store on PS3 and PS Vita closes in a few Latin American markets from August 2026, in more Latin American and Middle Eastern countries from late 2026, and everywhere else in July 2027.

Why it matters

The PS3 is the story of a market leader that got too confident and had to rebuild. Sony's next console, the PS4, was designed to be the opposite: easier to develop for, cheaper at launch and focused on games first. Much of PlayStation's success since 2013 grew out of lessons learned the hard way here.

WGC's take: the PS3's library is one of the best of any console, and much of it is about to become harder to buy. If you still have one, the next eight months are the time to fill in any digital gaps before the store closes in July 2027.