The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on November 11, 2006, in Japan, November 17, 2006, in North America, and March 23, 2007, in Europe and Australasia. The PlayStation 3 competed primarily against Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles.

The PlayStation 3 was developed on the purpose-built Cell processor, co-developed with Toshiba and IBM; SCE's president Ken Kutaragi envisioned a home entertainment system akin to supercomputers. It was the first console to use the Blu-ray disc as its primary storage medium, the first to be equipped with an HDMI port, and graphically was the first to be able to output at 1080p (Full HD) resolution.[21] The console launched together with the PlayStation Network online service, and was also the first to be controllable from a handheld console through its Remote Play connectivity. In September 2009, the Slim model of the PlayStation 3 was released; it no longer provided the hardware ability to run PS2 games, but it was lighter and thinner than the original version. A Super Slim redesign was released in late 2012, further refining the console.

During its early years, the system received a mixed reception, due to its high price ($599 for a 60-gigabyte model, $499 for a 20 GB model), a complex processor architecture, and lack of quality games, but was praised for its Blu-ray capabilities and "untapped potential". The reception improved over time. The system had a slow start in the market but managed to recover, particularly after the introduction of the Slim model, and managed to sell 87.4 million units to outsell the competing Xbox 360 and become the eighth-bestselling video game console in history. Its successor, the PlayStation 4, was released in November 2013; Sony started discontinuing the PlayStation 3 within two years' time,[with shipments of new units ending in most of the world by 2016, and the final units produced until May 29, 2017 in the Japanese market.