Released by Sony in 2006, the Playstation 3 Slim is a cut-down version of the original Playstation 3. The number of USB sockets was reduced to two; the memory card slots were removed; and Playstation 2 compatability was removed. It will play original Playstation games - the Playstation hardware had been condensed to a single chip by this point.

The original Playstation 3 was released on 23rd March 2007, and initially had a rather shaky start, the machine cost £429.99, way more than their rival Xbox 360 that had released a year and a half earlier, that already had a comfortable market share in the UK, thanks to the excellent Gears of War series and continuation of the Halo franchise, as well as the Xbox live service that Sony was just not able to match at that moment.

The hardware on paper was impressive, a built in Blu Ray drive, 4 memory card slots, 60GB hard drive, four USB ports and a good deal of the PS2 library was backwards compatible with the new machine.

The main problem was the Blu Ray drive was slow for games, meaning large installs, to avoid longer loading times, and the memory of the machine was not as efficient as the Xbox 360, added to this was a sluggish main processor, which relied on sub processors to deal with more advanced graphical functions, making the machine very difficult and expensive to develop for.

The first party games from Sony were slightly under par from previous machines too, with only Motorstorm really standing out. 

Also the marketing videos from the previous two years at trade shows, showed games like Motorstorm running, but when the titles finally appeared, they looked far less impressive.

With the launch of the Playstation 2, Sony was quick to market it as having the new DVD technology built in and overthought that people would upgrade from their DVD players to the new Hi Res Blu Ray format of the PS3, when in reality most were happy with what they had got, and were not willing to spend more money on a new machine and film collection, like they had with the Playstation 2 seven years earlier.

So for all these reasons ports of third party games did not run as well on the PS3, for the first couple of years of it's market life at least, and the machine was seen as less of a games machine, more of a multimedia jack of all trades that played games, an image that was only dispelled with the launch of games such as Uncharted and Killzone 2.

The price issue was solved to a degree with the launch of cheaper models, however PS2 compatibility was lost, along with the memory card slots and a couple of USB ports, even cheaper models such as the slim were released in the coming years, which were an even more cut down experience, losing the eject drive mechanism in favour of a sliding door.

Also the quality of first party games soon improved, as did the third parties output, and new features such as Playstation + for an online service, and some great downloadable software made the machine much more attractive to own.

Manufacturer: Sony Corporation
Date: 2006

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH41123. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.