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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, until Sony were their usual dickbag selves and destroyed OtherOS functionality with a software update.

[–] JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] MoxFcCloud@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

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