Sony Computer Entertainment Sony PlayStation 3

About

The Sony PlayStation 3 is the story of corporate hubris, spectacular failure, and one of the greatest comebacks in console history. Launched at an outrageous $599 with an architecture so complex developers hated it, the PS3 spent its first three years being outsold by both the Xbox 360 and Wii. Sony lost an estimated $3.3 billion on the hardware. Then, slowly and relentlessly, the PS3 recovered — driven by price cuts, the PS3 Slim, an extraordinary lineup of exclusive games, and Blu-ray’s victory over HD-DVD. It finished the generation with 87.4 million units sold, essentially tying the Xbox 360 and validating Sony’s long-term strategy at an enormous short-term cost. The PS3’s development centered on the Cell Broadband Engine — a joint project between Sony, IBM, and Toshiba that cost an estimated $400 million to develop. The Cell was architecturally radical: a single Power Processing Element (PPE) managing seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) — specialized cores capable of extraordinary parallel computation but requiring fundamentally different programming approaches than conventional CPUs. Sony also committed to including a Blu-ray drive — their proprietary optical disc format competing against Toshiba’s HD-DVD for the next-generation video standard. The Blu-ray drive added an estimated $100-200 to manufacturing costs, pushing the launch price to unsustainable levels. The PS3 launched on November 11, 2006 in Japan and November 17 in North America in two configurations: $499 (20 GB) and $599 (60 GB). Sony’s then-CEO Ken Kutaragi infamously said consumers would “work more hours to buy one.” The market disagreed. Microsoft’s Xbox 360, already a year old with a growing library, was priced at $299-399. Nintendo’s Wii, launching at $249 within days of the PS3, captured the mainstream imagination with motion controls. The PS3’s recovery began with the PS3 Slim (September 2009) at $299 — smaller, cooler, and finally hitting the price point that mass-market consumer

References

• Video Game Console Library↗