I lost all interest in sony when they released the PS4. A total lack of any interesting first party titles compared to the PS2 and PS3 made the system utterly useless when I already had a PC, and Soyny jumping on the California woke train was the final nail in the coffin.
Looks like this will be another PS3 generation, where it's really only worth buying the console once the slim versions come out near the end of its lifespan, although given the direction of GT7 and how games are getting PC releases now even that's being called into question.
That's what annoyed me the most about the PS3. It's like they were schizophrenic and couldn't stick to just ONE model, but had to make like 15 bajillion different version of the fucker, the later ones REALLY trying to push that Blu-Ray shit like it was the greatest technology ever made.
The first PS3 that could play both PS1 and PS2 games was fucking perfect. All they had to do was stick to that stucture and make it "the ultimate playstation system" while allowing for manual hardware upgrades (specifically a better HDD), and they would have been making fucking BANK. Hardcores could customize it however they wanted while the casuals had a fuck-ton of games, specifically back-catalog of stuff, they could play from if they didn't want to venture into the new shit.
But IMO this was the time where Sony lost their way and started doing stupid shit that lead them to the position they are in now.
That was because Sony was desperate to reduce costs.
Every 60 GB $600 PS3 was selling at a $240 loss, allegedly. On gaming forums that are long dead and buried, there was speculation that the true loss per console was closer to $400. Two years later, it led to sony losing $3 BILLION on console sales
And EVEN THEN, with two process node die shrinks and mass simplifcation of the console, the final PS3 slim model selling at $300 was still losing roughly $18 per console.
Sony finally managed to make the PS3 break even by introducing the super slim PS3, which in addition to much cheaper materials also used cheaper sizaxis hardware in its controller.
Fun fact: the reason the PS#3 lost backwards compatibility is due to the emotion engine. The PS2 was so autistically complicated that they simply had to build and entire PS2 EE onto the OG PS3 motherboard. It was also used for blu ray access. The PS1 controller was used for controller input and is used for PS1 games.
In case you ever wondered why the PS3 with 3 total game consoles in it lost money at $600.....
Maybe the Emotion Engine chip produced too much heat and Sony couldn't figure out how to remedy it quickly. PS3s and 360s were horrible with cooling themselves until much later.
It wasnt the emotion engine chip. Remember the super slim PS2, the one the size of an address book? Same chip, on a larger process node. The EE only pulled 15-20 watts during operation.
The CELL engine, OTOH, was a disaster. To keep it short, the original PS3 CPU was built on the same process node as the apple G5. and both shared some of IBM's PowerPC 970FX tech. The G5, if you remember, was so hot apple had to use GM dexcool radiators in the damn thing. The Cell was larger and far more complex (and power hungry) then the G5 was. High CELL usage + GPU usage could push 400 watts and frankly the cooling tech of 2005 was NOTHING like what we have today. (and 400w of power draw on 2005 process nodes is NOTHING like 400w on modern 7nm nodes for many physics related reasons).
Also, frankly, the YLOD problem on the PS3 was nowhere near as widespread. It's still easy to find functioning 60 GB PS3s from 2006 out there, but launch 360s that function properly are rare as hens teeth.
The Xbox CPU, the Xenox, was also built on the same process and used the Cell tech, but only used the main PPE and none of the SSEs, instead using three PPEs as a traditional tri-core CPU. While less complex, it was obnoxiously power hungry.
