The PS3 has been a relative failure of epic proportions for Sony.
Last gen, they were head and shoulders above every other platform. This gen, they've had to fight hard just to make a profit.
It honestly looks to me like being Sony's N64/Saturn.
Don't get me wrong, the PS3 has a whole load of amazing games and it has a lot of class leading technology, but in terms of where almost everyone predicted it would be, it's a complete failure.
Back in 2005, after the reveal, every commenter that I remember reading confidently spoke about Sony continuing to dominate gaming with the PS3 maintaining a market share similar to that of the PS2.
The Wii was a 'fad', and the 360 just didn't 'have what it takes' to challenge the dominance that the PlayStation brand had built up since the PS1.
It was even Microsoft who made the comment about Sony being able to sell "bricks" as long as they had the PlayStation logo on them. Nobody really disagreed.
Until 2005, PlayStation had always been more of a people's brand. The consoles/games were relatively cheap (and easy to copy), and there was a huge selection of software to choose from.
For some bizzare reason, in 2005, Sony decided to turn the people's console into the rich man's console. It's as if they were going for an Apple philosophy of selling quality hardware to a (mainly elitist) loyal, middle class demographic out of the blue.
'The PS3 will teach you discipline.' 'People will work overtime to be able to afford this console.' It was pretty sickening, but even when Sony was coming out with this stuff, almost nobody claimed that the PS3 would be anything other than a huge, market leading, continued source of profit for Sony.
You had Phil Harrison telling the world that the PS3 would completely do away with people's need for a PC, because Sony had managed to get into a position where it could afford to be so ambitious.
Then it all fell apart.
Big style!
The PS1 and PS2 were award winning consoles. The PS3 continued to win awards after its eventual release, but for the wrong reasons. 'Biggest PR disaster' and being in the "Top 21 Tech Screwups of 2006" are just a couple of examples. It was a spectacular collapse.
PlayStation, once the ONLY brand that devs would design for before porting, was attracting threats and huge criticisms from people in the industry. A big problem was that it was relatively difficult to code for, even though it could do more if devs were willing (which many of them weren't) to spend the man hours to work with it. On top of that, the software sales were relatively weak for a good few years. Even now, both other consoles consistently have higher sales figures for the majority of cross platform titles.
Sales of the PS3 should theoretically have taken off from day one, with the 360 and Wii fading into obscurity, but that didn't get anywhere close to happening.
Even with the Wii's SD graphics (yes, I know it had a different market by now, but still...) and the horrendous failure rate of the early 360 models, the price of the PS3 and it's lack of games meant that it never became a serious enough alternative to steal gamers who'd already left 'Planet PlayStation'.
Sony seemed to have completely dropped the ball, and were playing catch up for years. They saw the success of XBL, they tried to beat it with a free PSN and Home and failed. They saw the success of waggle, they tried to copy it, but there are no real signs of them taking much of a chunk (if anything at all) out of Wii sales.
Even after huge price drops, re-designs, new controllers, million dollar marketing and exclusive after exclusive, PS3 sales still haven't managed to eclipse Wii or even 360 sales for any decent amount of time.
On top of that, this whole new PSN saga isn't really anything new in terms of the PS3 being a complete turnaround for Sony. They've had PR disasters before this, and I'm sure they'll continue once (if) they manage to get PSN secure and up and runnig again.
But like I said before, it's not all doom and gloom.
Sony are selling millions of games and consoles, but compared to how they should be doing, they've completely failed with the PS3.
