The PS3 actually ended up outselling the 360 slightly. Like, very slightly. Couple 100k units or so. It’s probably the most balanced console generation in terms of sales.

Then Microsoft launched the Xbox One and Sony wiped the floor with them.

Honestly, if Sony just only added half as much shit to the PS3, like skip all those card readers god damn, they probably could’ve gotten away with being slightly more expensive than the 360. I mean, the 360 on launch didn’t have an HDMI port, didn’t have WiFi, none of the 360s come with a Blu-ray player (when movies just started being sold on Blu-ray and being a DVD player was one of the reasons the PS2 sold so damn well), you had to pay for multiplayer (I think that was in at launch, right?) and the console itself just kept bricking. Like, on a consumer side technical level, the only thing it had going for it was the controller. But, give it a year headstart and make it cheaper than the competition and that shit stops mattering for quite a while.

The PS3 is absolutely not the most expensive console on launch, either adjusted for inflation or not. The CD-i and the 3DO both were $700 at launch and the 20GB model of the PS3 started at 499$, just like the Xbox One, which many people have memory holed because the 60GB 599$ made such a stir for being expensive.

The launch lineup was relatively weak out of the gate, though, that much is true, although a bit exaggerated. There are some underrated games in that early batch, just no proper system seller. It was a bit better in Europe where at least CoD 3, Oblivion and a bunch of third party games were available soon after launch.

Yeah, the PS3 had some great exclusives, but it was an awful console overall.

Giant enemy crabs

I do understand what you’re saying, but it’s kind of hard to call it “better hardware” in light of how difficult it was to actually develop for.

Someone had to develop a chip for the next video game console. That console didn’t provide any value in itself, but was a platform to enable actual game studios to create immersive games for users. The chip design they chose hindered developers from doing that to the point that they were regularly outperformed by a far cheaper chipset.

I have a lot of respect for the nerdy details of the cell processor, and why it’s an interesting processor architecture, but in the sum total context of what it was designed to do I would push back a little on calling it ‘better’.

At the time, the PS3 was the cheapest bluray player out there when it launched. Also, this is andetodical, but my university had a cluster of PS3s booted into Linux to be used for Machine Learning, as it was the most affordable higher end GPUs you could get at the time. I’m surprised people think the PS3 was bad, but I guess from a business perspective, selling hardware at a loss expecting to make it up in game sales probably didn’t work out as well as execs hoped, because the PS3 had more capabilities than just playing games. I’d guess there’s a sizeable number of PS3 consoles which were purchased without ever buying a game to go along with it.

The ps3 was closer to 600 dollars then. Which is of course an even worse price. In addition, Xbox had a huge online lead. Xbox live was good during the original Xbox (nicer than the PS2’s online service) it got better with the Xbox 360 and Sony was left trying to catch up in a time when online games really took off.

Lol no one cares about rrod. It sucked for the first year of 360 buyers, they all got new consoles and that was basically that.

Xbox 360 was fairly dominant compared to the PS3 everywhere but Japan, and it’s a testament to the failure of Xbox leadership at the time how much the One launch flipped the tables.

Launching an always online, living room webcam / microphone in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations was wildly bad timing, on top of a lot of poor decisions to focus too much on tv and entertainment instead of gaming and you ended up with a gamer revolt. Then you had the utterly absurd failed launch of their core franchise on the console, which just hammered home their lack of focus on gaming, and it was never going to recover.

Back in 2006 too. OOF

The main reason people call it a disastrous launch is because it was Sony, right after the best selling console on the world, the PS2.

If it was any other company, the launch would be considered a huge success despite the controversy but for it to go toe to toe to the successor of OG Xbox, which in your own words didn’t do that great is a pretty big fall.