According to Igromania, Sony announced that it will no longer be manufacturing PS3 with 500 GB hard drive. It was the only model still manufactured in Japan until the announcement.
Originally the release of PlayStation 3 was planned for 2005, However, the console was officially released in November 2006 in Japan as well as March 2007 in Europe. In November 2013 the company noted that it sold over 80 million copies of the console and a number of games for it exceeded 4300.
Later Sony also introduced PlayStation 3 Slim as well as Super Slim. Despite PlayStation 4’s release in November 2013, Sony still continued manufacturing small parties of PS3.
