Why PlayStation 2

[oliveira]

Partly, PC dominates here because the game released about 18 months earlier here on PC than PS2, and partly because SCEA only made and sold the hardware required to run the game for about 9 months (March 2004 - November 2004). In Japan the game launched on PS2 6 months before PC, and the hardware was much more widely available and for a much longer time span (2001-2009 or 2010). There simply aren't as many HDD units in North America, so there's a smaller player base because SCEA created that scarcity.

Meant to edit this into the previous post, whoops.

PS2 regions are set as "flags" just like XBOX360. I was shocked when I learned that.

What you said is true about all discs, but hard drive contents could be made region free if they wished to.
But their policy was DRACONIAN DRM (DNAS) and DRACONIAN market control (regional lockdown).

Dang, SONY... At some point their policies even hurt SquareSoft (before the merge with Enix, there were a serious shortage of harddrives in Japan)... I suppose that helps to explain why they had to take some shortcuts with the PC version (dirty textures, broken models) as they needed to use automated tools to convert the PS2 data to PC and a lot of mistakes these tools did on the data were overlooked...

[bungiefanNA]

They also offered two versions of the HDD (an internal and an external) in Japan as well as a Lin-station HDD (which turned the PS2 into a pure computer). Again, another example of the home market getting preferential treatment.

There were two versions of HDD because there was an extra series of PS2 released in Japan before our launch model series. The model 10000 had no expansion bay, it had a PCMCIA slot for a PC card. The external HDD connected to that card, and wasn't compatible with model 30000 and 50000 systems with the expansion bay. The internal drive plugged into the Network Adapter, which plugged into the DEV9 port at the top of the expansion bay.

Japan had 3 models of PS2 in that series before we got our launch model. They had the 10000, 15000, and 18000, then the 30000 came out globally.