this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Was the PS3 that bad?
The launch was. Firstly, it was insanely expensive compared to all other consoles, ever. It may still have the dubious honour of the most expensive console on launch.
The E3 presentation that announced it was also just astoundingly bad. Tons of memes came out of it like "attack the weak spot for massive damage" and "RIIIIIDGE RAAAAAACERRRRR".
The launch games ranged from bad to forgettable. Most third party games ran badly on it compared to the Xbox 360. The dev kits were annoying to get, and didn't have proper documentation. A lot of the initial exclusives were underwhelming and boring, leading to the meme of "The PS3 has no games".
Harris left in 2008, and that's when things started turning around. It wasn't until Microsoft got stupid about Kinect and Sony doubled their efforts on quality exclusives after the success of Uncharted 2 and Infamous and the rest of that generation went the other way from the first half.
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.
Slightly, yes. Most balanced generation, absolutely. Depending on who you ask and when you take the snapshot the PS3 got a couple million units ahead, on account of being in manufacturing longer in some regions.
No issues with the rest of your post, though. The original 360 didn't even come with a hard drive as standard, which I think people forget (but game devs had to struggle with for the whole generation, since back-compat with launch models was mandatory until very late).
The move of keeping it as cheap as possible and getting the money back in subscriptions proved very successful, though. I guess we're all paying the price of how forward looking that was, including Microsoft.
Now that you mention it the 360 would have made the most sense to ship with HDMI since the original Xbox was the first console to launch with Ethernet access built-in.
HDMI combined with a Blu-ray player, instead of a separate HD-DVD, could have given it the edge over the PS3. Although Blu-ray is/was a Sony technology they ended up having to do it anyways in the Xbox One ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
I don't think CD-i and 3DO should be counted for this.
The 3DO had a weird business model and the price point was considering it didn't sell at a loss like most consoles do -- It didn't catch on because it was a weird interstitial thing that was more powerful than the then-popular SNES/Mega Drive but leagues less powerful than the (already announced, already on the way) PS1 and Saturn.
And the CD-i? That one didn't even intend to be a games console at first. Philips was trying to make a ~multimedia machine~ out of a belief that those 90s interactive encyclopedia/activity center CD-Roms that were popular on PC were the future of consumer media. It was priced like a high-end media player, because that's what they meant for it to be. They only pivoted to games at the ass-end of its lifecycle in hopes of salvaging the unmitigated disaster that had turned out to be. And when they did, they did so with a redesigned model that had a lot of the high-end features removed to "console-ize" their multimedia player, making it much cheaper.
Hey, they were both advertised alongside the rest of the gen 5 consoles, they absolutely count.
But hey, if you're gonna be that guy AND ignore the post-PS3 consoles that all launched at higher prices, how about the Neo Geo? Because that launched at $650 in 1991 money.
The point is that no, the PS3 does not hold "have the dubious honor of most expensive console at launch" by any definition of that concept.
Fair enough.
I mean I was only thinking of the major, mainstream home consoles. But that's why I said "may”, the history of experimental game consoles and regional price differences is a whole study itself. But certainly nobody at the time expected Sony to go from a more lower priced option to the most expensive one.
The 20 GB isn't remembered much because even the Xbox 360's 20GB model was considered way too small even a year later. Even to this day, the basic model of any console or GPU isn't really considered the standard, but the budget option.
At least the PS3 let you toss in your own HDD though. The Xbox 360's proprietary ones (and all its other accessories) were way more expensive.
Really, with all the accessories considered, the PS3 was actually a cheaper console even at $100 more.
The base model of the 360 shipped with no hard drive at all, it used memory cards. I know because that was the SKU I got until I bought an add-on drive. The 20GB one was the big one. Nobody thought the 20GB PS3 compared unfavorably to the base Xbox SKU.
I mean, you're right that people fixated on the 60GB model in that the $600 tag was a psychological barrier, but it certainly wasn't the most expensive console at launch, mainstream or not. It takes a bit of cherry picking to argue that the Neo Geo wasn't mainstream or that the absolutely existing 20GB model (also the SKU I got) doesn't count.
Ultimately, price was a factor and the PS3 launch was weak, but it wasn't a disaster and it wasn't as overpriced as people make it out to be, as you said.
Yeah, the PS3 had some great exclusives, but it was an awful console overall.
Giant enemy crabs
I remember it took Fooooreveeer for quality titles to come out. Plus, in my opinion The PS2 Was such a juggernaut that the PS3 had way too many expectations for what a PS2 successor should be.
Overall, wasn’t THAT bad all things considered. It got Blue Ray to beat out HD DVD which lets be honest, was Sony’s main reason for releasing the console.
Along with what's already been mentioned, it was very difficult to program for due to some interesting hardware differences and took developers a few years to really figure out which lead to some poor performance despite better hardware.
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'.
Maybe "more powerful" would be the better term
These are all valid points. But I don’t think the “better hardware” that helped the PS3 take the lead was really just about the cell processor. Nor do I think it played much of a role in the console’s price at launch. IIRC, at least in Australia, it was the cheapest BluRay player you could buy when it launched.
While both console’s were only really capable of 720p HD, many large open-world games had to use SD assets to fit everything on a DVD.
Microsoft clearly made that choice to keep the price lower at launch, and maybe Sony took the L on that one. But I don’t think they would have had the same resurgence later in it’s lifecycle otherwise.
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.
Well, until Sony were their usual dickbag selves and destroyed OtherOS functionality with a software update.
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
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.
I was in highschool when the PS3 and 360 were in their prime. It was almost like the console wars part 2, but it was a cold social war. A lot of people had one or the other, but rarely both. What console you had heavily decided who your friends were. Depending on who was in your halo party, or fragging out in COD, or co-oping through borderlands 2. That was your crew. You spent hours with them and it really changed how strong some bonds were more than people realized. The PS3 had a somewhat luxury feel to it, while the 360 was more cool, I particularly liked the blade UI. The PS3 was perfectly fine, but it was pricier and therefore less popular amongst middle/lower class families. I worked at the time and saved up for both. My core group of friends played PlayStation, so that's what I rocked for online games and as my primary. My 360 was jtagged with a rgh and I yanked out the disc drive and replaced it with a bigger hard drive. That was solely for pirated solo games and exclusives. Good times. The following generation I was strictly PS4 until switching to PC full time
FIVE HUNDRED AND NINTY NINE US DOLLARS
Back in 2006 too. OOF
Wow, people here were in high school or not born back then, huh? Crap.
No, the PS3 wasn't that bad. It dominated pretty quickly in EU and Japanese territories where people weren't as keen on Xbox Live, and once they dropped backwards compatibility and the price (still hate that, I've re-bought a fat PS3 later in life), they actually caught up and ended up narrowly outselling the 360.
It's one of those consoles that performed differently in different regions, like the OG Xbox and the N64, which did way worse than people think. It ended up being a pretty even split, so Americans in particular remember the launch as being disastrous and it has become a bit of a trope. It wasn't a good launch, but definitely not one of the top three worst console launches in history, even among the mainstream players.
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.
Sure, and I did say it wasn't a good launch.
It was far from a disaster in context, though. The 360 had a whole year's head start (almost two in Europe), and it was already a massive hit, particularly in the US, by the time Sony hit the market.
People were (rightfully) disappointed by the spec and the launch lineup and (not so rightfully) bummed out by the price, but it was far from a disaster and it fully turned around by the end of the generation.