PS3: the most over-engineered console - or how Sony almost lost it all

High Price, difficult to develop for were some medium disadvantages of the PS3.

But the most significant change that really hurt Sony during the PS3 gen was the massive exodus of third-party exclusive IPs from the PS2 to the PS3 to the point that they had to increase their first-party input to attract more customers.

Also, the system had 3 consecutive years with price cuts after launch, never seen before.
 
Don't you mean "perfectly engineered"?

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I think I'll always consider the PS2 my favorite console of all time but I don't think PS3 is that far behind. I love the PS3 and while I don't think it has the heights of PS2 it was the first console where I had my own money and my first real experience with online so I played a lot more games overall. I love the 360 as well but personally the PS3 was better.

Badlucktroll said:
That game drought after release was fucking BRUTAL. I bought a 360 lol
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Insane Metal said:
Oh man it really was.
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What's funny is that the situation got completely flipped after a couple years.
 
The world is not yet ready with Cell processor that time. Cell processor was a very impressive, powerful, and revolutionary technology. Even hospitals use the cell processors and the technology was banned to to be exported to China and North Korea because of risk that it can be use for military purposes.
 
After PS2 success they thought big, price and all. Ken Kutaragi had his Hironobu Sakaguchi moment and made Sony bleed money with the PS3.
They went safe route with PS4 and made a great console, it has a very good catalog of games and still receives cross gen titles.

I hadn't luck with hardware reliability of PS3, 60GB launch console YLOD and two Slims failed on me.
I still love some aspects of it, the traditional controller, the amazing XMB UI and the various gems like Folklore or 3D Dot Game Heroes.
 
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Remember when Metal Gear Solid 4 hit its launch date? That was the turning moment for Sony, the ultimate pay off for the decisions made. Game having to install itself in between chapters if I remember correctly was so cool and the whole 50gb of the dual layer blu ray being used was also crazy. To me this was the game that justified the entire purchase, not sure if that happens anymore.
 
KimDongHwan said:
Remember when Metal Gear Solid 4 hit its launch date? That was the turning moment for Sony, the ultimate pay off for the decisions made. Game having to install itself in between chapters if I remember correctly was so cool and the whole 50gb of the dual layer blu ray being used was also crazy. To me this was the game that justified the entire purchase, not sure if that happens anymore.
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The consoles have become much more similar since that generation, and it seems they'll be continuing that approach going forward, so we will not have these types of games anymore. There's nothing on PS5 that could not run on XSX, and vice-versa.
 
You say over engineered, but that's after they lost tons of stuff from the 2005 prototype: Dual-HDMI Out, triple Ethernet hub, 6 USB ports, along with memory card slots for SD, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick Pro.

iu
 
yogaflame said:
The world is not yet ready with Cell processor that time. Cell processor was a very impressive, powerful, and revolutionary technology. Even hospitals use the cell processors and the technology was banned to to be exported to China and North Korea because of risk that it can be use for military purposes.
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And IBM ditch the technology in 2009
The roadrunner supercomputer is the last dance in professional market
 
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The only console I've ever had die on my was my 60gb ps3 phat.
I replaced it with a slim that's still working to this day though.
One of my very favorite consoles of all time.
 
Chittagong said:
You say over engineered, but that's after they lost tons of stuff from the 2005 prototype: Dual-HDMI Out, triple Ethernet hub, 6 USB ports, along with memory card slots for SD, CompactFlash, and Memory Stick Pro.

iu
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and it looked sooo sexy (except for that stupid ass boomerang controller)

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KimDongHwan said:
And at some point I remember we also lost PS1/PS2 native emulation
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ps1 was always emulation, but early units had full ps2 hardware support.
then it went hybrid (ps2 cpu was emulated; ps2 gpu was still hardware)
then ps2 support went 100% bye bye.

early models also had super audio cd support too.

the only "full feature" ps3 was the e3 reveal prototype.
every version thereafter lost features.
 
yogaflame said:
The world is not yet ready with Cell processor that time. Cell processor was a very impressive, powerful, and revolutionary technology. Even hospitals use the cell processors and the technology was banned to to be exported to China and North Korea because of risk that it can be use for military purposes.
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Much like the rest of the PS3, the Cell processor was over-engineered.The world was ready for it. It just got in its own way at a time when chip development was rapidly evolving. On paper it was a beast, but in the end it was easier to get better performance out of less complex chips. It was a beast with floating point math, though. Too bad we never saw it reach its potential.
 
The PS3 is why I find the complaints about console prices today(even with $50 tariff increase) A bit ridiculous. It cost $599 at launch in 2006 which is equal to roughly $950 today and Sony was telling people to get a second job.
 
the following isn't an opinion on the console's library, just the system taken by itself, the pure hardware and nothing else... it's an absolutely terribly conceived piece of shit.

an overly complicated CPU that needs to be used to give the underpowered GPU (compared to a console that launched a year before none the less) support on GPU related tasks, and a memory setup that people had to work around while already being memory starved in the best cases.
like fuck man...
and why the actual fuck did that thing have 4 fucking USB ports? what the actual fuck did Sony imagine people connect to the front of their PS3? and then under that flap there were 3 fucking flash card readers... I have never met someone or read about anyone actually putting a fucking CompactFlash card into a PS3...

its saving grace was legit the fact that it was among the cheapest bluray players of its time. if it didn't have that element to it, like, it might have been the worst console ever made by a major player.

and let's not forget that it also has essentially the same issue the 360 had. every launch model PS3 will die. they are all ticking time bombs. they just die slower than the launch 360, which is why it's often forgotten. but even at the time it had among the highest failure rates of any home electronic device, just behind the faster failing launch 360.

then there was that dogshit ass controller! holy fucking hell... talk about behind the times.
refusing to improve on the design they came up with in the 90s, when dual analog controls were still in their infancy, where analog triggers were only a wet dream of Sega execs.
depending on how you position your thumbs, you would literally collide in the middle due to how close the sticks were. the sticks themselves of course slippers as hell, and the analog triggers they shat out into the world are so absolutely awful, it's actually impressive.

some might not remember this, but most shooters back then literally swapped the button mapping compared to the 360 versions, and had ADS and Fire mapped to L1 and R1 respectively... the triggers were so unfathomably shit that they were relegated to replace the function of what the bumpers would do on any other modern controller.

then they couldn't have rumble due to a licensing dispute, and lied to their users, saying it's "BY DESIGN" because rumble is a "LAST GEN FEATURE" noone needs. fucking hell.

the system also lacked a scaler chip, which meant if the devs didn't have the GPU power left to upscale the game to every resolution between 480p and 1080p, you'd be stuck with a 720p signal on a 1080p TV, which back then usually meant really bad scaling by the TV.
most "HD Ready" TVs also didn't have a resolution of 1280x720, but instead one of 1366x768, an output resolution the PS3 just straight up didn't support. so on most HD Ready TVs, you'd be stuck with your TV scaling the image.

TLDR: the CPU/GPU combo was retarded, the hardware designed for fucking IT Departments not for gaming, the controller was a joke and the gaming features were at least half a decade behind the times.
 
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I can't find a clip, but Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning said the PS3 put half the industry out of business. Which is an interesting comment.
 
violence said:
I can't find a clip, but Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning said the PS3 put half the industry out of business. Which is an interesting comment.
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it got to a point where some Japanese devs made games only for the 360.
don't forget that Bayonetta, the spiritual successor to Devil May Cry 3, a then PlayStation exclusive IP, was developed by Japanese developers Platinum games, exclusively for the Xbox 360.
it was Sega that demanded a PS3 port and let a Sega internal team port it, which they miserably failed at, resulting in a game that drops into the 20fps range while targeting 60fps.

so if Sega didn't step in, Bayonetta would have been an Xbox 360 exclusive game without any intervention of Microsoft.

a scenario like that is unthinkable in any other video game era other than the early to mid PS360 lifecycle.
could you imagine a japanese AAA dev making an Xbox exclusive game without any exclusivity deal or anything? hell no. and the main reason there was the hardware of the PS3.
and japanese indy devs almost exclusively made games for the 360. it was the indy game console in japan basically. Raiden 4, which is a more well known example, was an Xbox 360 exclusive for 7 years until they rereleased it. but if you looked through the japanese 360 store you'd come across tiny japanese indy games you never heard of, and which never made it to PS3
 
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Interesting times for sure. Thinking the PS3 was gonna keep the momentum but loved playing on the 360 (except for the Red Ring of Death). Finally switching to PS3 once the Demon's Souls and Last of Us kicked off.
 
I remember most fondly playing MGS4 when it came out. I think that's when I bought mine?

At the time I had no idea about TV resolutions etc. I played the game and others on a smaller TV I had in my bedroom as a high schooler. My dad then gifted me a much larger 1080P TV maybe a year after having the PS3.

I then realized and idk how I hadn't noticed but part of the screen for MGS4 was cut off on my old tv. I think I hadn't had access to the radar. Literally didn't know it had one.

I also played RE5 on this new tv with the ps3 and my brain melted at how vibrant all the colors were.

Killzone 2? Shiiiiit. Uncharted 2? Fuuuuuck.

PS3 was incredible.
 
I got an X360 just before PS3 release and didn't really want any of the early games.

I only got into PS3 with the Slim release and picked up a few games with it like Folklore and such. I do have a soft spot for PS3 despite its issues and it's still hooked up to my TV downstairs.
 
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This was from June 2009, the infamous Bobby Kotick threatened to pull off support from the PS3 if Sony doesn't lowered the price of the System, then September 2009 came with the Slim and the rest is History.

More than 15 years later, COD sell most on PlayStation consoles.
 
I wish the trend of developing Pro variants of consoles had started during the PS3 gen.

A device that ran The Last Of Us, Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Resistance, Heavy Rain, Gran Turismo, MotorStorm, Final Fantasy Versus XIII and Metal Gear Solid 4 at native 1080p (or proper 720p 3D) would've been glorious.
 
It was overengineered, but it was also a fucking BEAST.

People look back on it as a misstep, but PS3 was fucking amazing. Forget the business side. As a gamer, it had a slow start, but it really delivered the goods.
 
consoul said:
I know it struggled in multiplatform comparisons, but games that were optimised for the Cell and SPEs (like Uncharted 2/3, The Last of Us, Killzone 2) were incredible at the time.
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it still was less powerful than a console released a year early, while being harder to develop for. the hardware was just awful and a big mistake all around. it certainly wasn't a beast.
meanwhile the Xbox 360's GPU was almost a year ahead of the PC market even.
the 360 did stuff in late 2005, that only came to the PC market with DirectX 10 in early 2007.
 
kevboard said:
it still was less powerful than a console released a year early, while being harder to develop for. the hardware was just awful and a big mistake all around. it certainly wasn't a beast.
meanwhile the Xbox 360's GPU was almost a year ahead of the PC market even.
the 360 did stuff in late 2005, that only came to the PC market with DirectX 10 in early 2007.
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No greater fumble than Xbox after 360.

It's an incredible feat.
 
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