The PS3's comeback was insane

Soon it'll be a steam console sitting the corner of every room
- I am quite excited for if Valve make a successor to the Steam Machine, as the Deck shows a Linux gaming device can be the perfect do anything device. The first Steam Machine was not ready for prime time when it came out, but it came before Proton.
  
  I still have the Steam Link hardware console though, still rocking and letting me play my PC on the TV
- So a computer hooked up the TV?
  
  So a console?
- I have a HTPC with Bazzite set up in my loft that acts like a console. It's great!

I know exactly the cause of this. The 360 got a bad rep because of the red ring of death fiasco bricking the consoles. All because of a few design flaws, mostly around the processors assembly that took them quite a while to figure out the cause of, and even longer to do anything about.
Then the even bigger nail in the coffin of Blu-ray beating out HD DVD, and a PS3 being pretty much the cheapest blu ray player you could get.
- The last part was always crazy to me. A device that only played Blu-Ray movies was like $1000, but the PS3, which could do that and so much more was half the price of a basic as fuck blu ray player.
  
  Sell console at a loss, get profit from games and online subscriptions
  
  It was the same story with DVD and the PS2, which was in no small part a major reason for its early success.
  Sony also sold the PS3 itself at a loss at launch in order to get a bigger install base, and hoped to make their money back on software sales.
  
  It's called subsidizing
- PS3 launched at $500 in 2006 and Xbox launched at $300 ($400 with HDD) in 2005. Then ps3 had a slim model in 2009 that was $300. Xbox was ahead and Microsoft got lazy whereas ps3 was starting to get some fun exclusives and had a free online. There are just multiple factors that played into this.
- I have two working PS3s and one broken 360.
  One of the PS3s is a launch unit. Impressive machine.
  
  Yep. Usually the only PS3 issue that happens is when the drive wears out, eventually. I think that turns into a big issue because 8 believe the drive is "paired" to the PlayStation, so you'd have to move over the control board on the drive to the replacement drive. If you don't swap those you have to do a bunch of custom firmware bullshit.

Crazy stuff considering the playstation has no games
- Console war dumb shit go brrrrrr
  
  it's an old meme
  
  Burn

I'm 85% certain people switched after people got the red ring of death on Xbox. Hell that's why I don't by Xbox now
- My ps3 got what I called "the yellow light of death". They both had the same issue.
  
  If you're interested, RIP Felix did a pretty good video on YouTube about the YLOD failures. TL:DW is most early models have defective GPUs, plus the ones that survived now have aging capacitors, but there's tools now to find the exact cause from the system controller (SYSCON). A GPU swap is pretty involved though, so needs a skilled technician to pull it off. Still, if you have one of those early backwards compatible models, having it repaired isn't that bad of an idea nowadays since those consoles are only getting rarer.
- I got locked out of my Xbox live account for like 5-8 years with no way to recover it because my @live email was not my main email and their recovery process asked for emails you may have been sent.
  I somehow ended up having a temporary email attached to it that came with a game server hosting site that I no longer had. When I found this out I resubbed to that service and hoped i could get the same email address and I did and was finally able to get back in.
  By then though I had moved to the PS3 and have stuck with Sony since (for consoles). But getting my Xbox account back allowed me to redownload all of my rock band 3 dlc again.

Man, I 'member those times. PS3 launch was complete joke, scalpers sold the console for thousands of dollars, with one in particular going for over 17k. This, remember, in 2006. Everyone was making fun of it, from ScrewAttack to VGCats
- The PS3 is in competition with the original Xbox One for being the most undercooked and overpriced launch of a game console. I guess it's what made the recovery even more astounding.
  
  The PS3 suffered from lack of games and low stocks for the first 2 years, if I'm not mistaken. Pretty sure they only managed to pull through because they're a megacorp, with other areas covering up the losses in the meantime. Having a much lower failure rate compared to the 360 certainly helped, too.
  The X1 died by M$ showing their hubris at every opportunity before launch. "We'll block used physical game sales! Fuck games, this is your home media server! The kinect is mandatory and will spy on you! Yes, even while the console is powered down!" - Sony's marketing was just "We don't do any of that"

One of my favorite consoles, though I wish they had stuck to their guns on backwards compatibility. I'm many ways it was my last console, no dedicated console since has taken its place in terms of number of games purchased. And the UI, good gravy, was I a fan of that simple and responsive UI.
- I guess they had to remove backwards compatibility at some point considering the solution was to shove an entire PS2 CPU and GPU onto the motherboard, massively driving up the already stratospheric production cost that they lost money on even with the high launch prices. Still, it is unfortunate it went away, as it ensured that PS2 games would play perfectly and as intended on PS3 with a proper HDMI output too. Plus, since it went away early, it means all the models with backwards compatibility have the defective GPUs that can cause a yellow light of death. A PS3 Slim with PS2 compatibility would have been amazing. I agree so much with XMB being peak UI design as well, almost every console following has in my opinion a worse UI, other than maybe the Switch, but that's because the Switch barely has much beyond a game selector.

Loads of people still don't realise that on a numbers basis, PS3 "won" that generation. But I think culturally it's understood that the 360 did and because of that people are usually shocked at the PS3s sales figures.
- I'm pretty sure the Wii won that battle. 101-some-odd million units of that were sold, 87ish for the PS3 and 84ish for the 360. The PS2 still blows everything else out of the water, still being the best selling console of all time at 160 million or so.
  People had a big time hate-on for the PS3 in its initial years. At launch the PS3 was the most expensive of the current gen options and Sony didn't have much of anything very compelling to run on it. The mantra at the time was "going Wii60," i.e. getting an Xbox 360 for all the big name AAA titles and a Wii for all the niche Nintendo stuff and pointedly ignoring the PS3 entirely, because the notion was you could buy a base 360 and a Wii for about the same as the cost of a PS3. All that took a few years to get turned around.
- I still have my original PS3. Had to replace the hardrive once.
  Still have the Wii, which had a bad disk reader in the first 30 days. I had to send it to the repair shop in Toronto and they had it fixed and back to me within 48 hours for free.
  My first XBox 360 lasted 2 days past it's 1 year warranty date and died. Disk drive thought everything was a DVD. MS wanted $100 for repairs plus shipping. I bought a used 360 instead for $80. That one also died 1 year later, red ring. Next one I bought a replacement, one of the lower end models. Lasted 10 days past the 1 year warranty.. Then thought everything was a DVD.... This keeps going. By the time 2016 rolled around I had gone through 10 of those pieces of shit. I finally gave up on the games I liked on that system, and I've never bought a new MS system since. I honestly wonder what their true sales were if you deduped it by removing replacements from their tally.
  I have my original PS2, PS3, PS4, GameCube, SNES, Wii, Switch.
  There are quality gaming consoles out there, and then there's whatever the fuck MS spews onto the market.