Why PlayStation 2

[bungiefanNA]

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.

[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...