this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Too young to remember but I do know the original PS3 was marketed more as a multimedia device, and started at $499 in 2006, which is over $750 today. That probably gave the Xbox 360 a boost. However the PS3 is likely viewed more favorably today since the slim model was much cheaper and marketed as a gaming console rather than multimedia, whereas Microsoft had the Red Ring of Death to deal with before they went down the Multimedia marketing path, which culminated in the Xbox One launch, also pictured.
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.
This kinda highlights the multimedia thing I mentioned. They packed so many things into the original PS3 that the average consumer was either overwhelmed or simply couldn't afford it.
The PS3 wasn't bad, in fact it was the objectively better console, it was jusg so expensive to produce that the average consumer couldn't buy it or simply didn't need all of its capabilities.
Xbox One had similar problems. I remember people arguing about what was more powerful back in the day and iirc it was xbox one by a hair, but because of the extra functions they put in it xbox had walled off some of its power from devs using it