The Playstation 3 (PS3) was released in November 2006 and it would be 10 months before I finally bought one early in September of 2007. The system was very expensive ($500), had a slow start, and even almost a year into release there was a lack of games that caught my eye. Indeed, for the first couple of weeks I owned it, I didn’t even buy any games for it and instead used it to watch blu-rays and play PS2 games!
Looking back on the PS3 I remember it as the console that ushered in – for me – the era of downloading games. Sony introduced the PlayStation shop with the PS3 and there was a lot of interesting and inexpensive games available, and during the life of the console I probably bought a couple of dozen games online. Of course I also bought disc games – 98 in total – and my PS3 library ended up being one of my top 10 biggest game collections.
That’s the bulk of them above, and notable titles included the first of the Souls series, the immersive RPG Dragons Dogma and Diablo 3 which featured couch co-op that KLS used to play together endlessly. In fact we played the PS3 often enough that not one, but two of them died, with the laser failing on one and the disc tray on the other! We played them both to death 🙂
The PS3 era of games is unremarkable from a collector’s perspective. They’re not old enough to be retro, and not new enough to be appealing to modern gamers. Furthermore, many of the landmark titles have been rereleased or ‘remastered’ for newer consoles. There is very little value in PS3 games today, and it’s probably the least collected console. The vast majority of my games – which are of course all in pristine condition – are only ‘worth’ only a few dollars. I have a couple of ‘rare’ games (shown above) but even then they’d sell for less what I paid for them. Maybe one day PS3 games will gain value, but I don’t think that day is anytime soon.
The life of the PS3 extended all the way into 2017, but long before it was retired it had already been surpassed by its followup, the PlayStation 4 (PS4). This was released in late 2013, but I didn’t get mine until Christmas 2014 (in response to the death of our second PS3).
In some ways the PS4 is still a current-era console, in that it has yet to be officially retired and you can still buy them new in stores. For many years ours was our primary console, and both KLS and myself played it extensively. And then, about 2 years ago, it died as well, and we didn’t replace it (although not for lack of trying).
I loved the PS4. It has a great controller, a good OS and it was successful enough that the market supported lots of fantastic games (such as Monster Hunter World, Nioh and several Vanillaware games). It had easy and fast online play, and if you didn’t absolutely need them upon launch the games were reasonably priced after a few months as well.
In the 7+ years we owned one I bought 123 PS4 games. I think – since many of them were $30 or less – this was also the console with the lowest average game price of any I have ever owned. That’s not to say I didn’t over time pick up a few games that are a little more collectible (such as the limited edition of Odin Sphere) shown above, but most of my PS4 library is as unremarkable (as collectibles) as my PS3 games.
This post is because – as with the Wii and Wii U collections – I’m also selling my PS3 and PS4 games. Look closely at the above pics and you may note that there are four games that I bought for both the PS3 and PS4 and one of them – Dragon’s Crown – I also own for the Vita! I love that game to death, and it’s one of a few that will be hard to say goodbye to (especially since it’s a collectors metal case edition with an unopened pack of trading cards) but I hold out hope we may get yet another remaster for Switch sometime soon. The bulk of these games I won’t miss though: they were fun to play in their time, but I’ll never play them again and they’re just now taking up space in the house.
Between 1995 and 2021 we had (8 models of) four different PlayStation consoles in our house (not including PSP or Vita) but have yet to buy a PlayStation 5. Right now it doesn’t have many games I’m interested in, it’s very expensive, and the Switch is more than enough for our needs. With the sell off of my PS3/PS4 collections has the sun set on PlayStation in this house? Time will tell…
