Evil is a bit strong, but they’re selling the console with the expectation they’ll make up more in games sales, yes it kind of jams up the business plan.
Are you arguing the PS3 should have released at $1000 when everyone thought $600 was already laughably astronomically high? Or would you have preferred an underspec system?
If the choice is between that and letting Sony defraud its customers by sabotaging their property, then Hell yes, Sony should’ve been forced to charge $1000!
What the fuck is wrong with you that you think Sony’s literal crimes were OK?!
I’m not defending them removing the functionality and I agree it was sold with a feature, that should have been supported. I just think we didn’t see the Other OS option continue through the generations because the hardware’s price point was taken advantage of.
Sony could have imposed a fee to unlock Other OS, but I don’t think anyone would have felt better shelling out an additional $400 to use it. Situation becomes then home customer gets no value from it, businesses are no longer incentivized to buy playstations, and Sony has to continue supporting this thing that few people are paying to access.
First of all, I think every “pay to unlock the capabilities of the hardware you already bought” is literally criminal (and by “literally” I mean “actually literally, not figuratively, and the FTC is failing to do its job by not prosecuting it”) no matter how much it gets normalized. Second, in this particular case it was unlocked from the get-go by default, so Sony would’ve had to forcibly lock it first and then try to charge for it, which would’ve been somehow even more blatantly criminal!
The real alternative here would’ve been for Sony to take the fucking L and comply with the law. They could’ve revised future units to not support OtherOS (as they, in fact, did), but forcibly removing it from units that had already been sold was absolutely beyond the pale and should’ve been stopped.
Their plan was to make up the difference in game sales. You were paying full price with the cost shifted to the games to trick you into thinking you got a bargain.
If I sell you a hot dog for $1 with a business model that you will buy an overpriced soda 5 minutes later at the stand next door, I don’t get to take that hotdog back after sale when I see you didn’t also buy the soda.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy, and it was quite normal for consoles to be subsidized with that exact goal. They needed systems affordable enough to get into homes, otherwise there’s no user base. No user base means no opportunity for game sales. No game sales, and it ends up as the Dreamcast.
So it starts to sound like their big mistake was ever allowing Linux and general computing to begin with? Sony were the only ones doing that even while the competition was an actual x86 machine running some form of Windows. Users still had to buy a PC to use office.
Companies (and governments) saw an opportunity for cheap computers that outperformed traditional servers and took advantage of it. Now no one gets Linux.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy,
Selling at a loss is fine. What isn’t fine is coming back later and grabbing the hot dog, a hot dog you already paid for, out of your hand because you didn’t buy the soda a while later despite nothing in the hotdog purchase that required the purchase of a soda.
They sold it with Linux and then later grabbed it out of the customer’s hand.
If that’s the real price and the games are then also $25 cheaper, sure. They’re not giving you that money for free, the average consumer spends the same amount on the system+games either way. If they decide to use a misleading pricing strategy to manipulate people they don’t get to complain when people use products they bought differently to how they were intended.
The ps3 was an oddly specd system with little documentation for developers. It was overdeveloped and under utilized. Could have saved on r&d with the cell processor and gone with normal architecture eg ps4 and 5.
Edit to add that the cell processor was best at floating point calculations rather than raster graphics pipelines. So the best use case scenario were things like folding@home or the Linux os server stream.
I think I’d rather things cost what they need to cost, rather than games being expensive because the console was cheap. That way the manufacturer won’t be so invested in what you do with it after the sale, and you’re not getting scammed on the software pricing.
Okay well you go try convince the general public to pay $1000 ($1700 today) for a toy. Your primary competitor is using games to subsidize their hardware too at $300 but completely locked and unable to perform general computing. Good luck.
Oh no. They used something they owned in a different way than the manufacturer foresaw. How evil!
Evil is a bit strong, but they’re selling the console with the expectation they’ll make up more in games sales, yes it kind of jams up the business plan.
So blame the dumb business plan?
Are you arguing the PS3 should have released at $1000 when everyone thought $600 was already laughably astronomically high? Or would you have preferred an underspec system?
If the choice is between that and letting Sony defraud its customers by sabotaging their property, then Hell yes, Sony should’ve been forced to charge $1000!
What the fuck is wrong with you that you think Sony’s literal crimes were OK?!
I’m not defending them removing the functionality and I agree it was sold with a feature, that should have been supported. I just think we didn’t see the Other OS option continue through the generations because the hardware’s price point was taken advantage of.
Sony could have imposed a fee to unlock Other OS, but I don’t think anyone would have felt better shelling out an additional $400 to use it. Situation becomes then home customer gets no value from it, businesses are no longer incentivized to buy playstations, and Sony has to continue supporting this thing that few people are paying to access.
No, that’s extortion, which is also a crime.
First of all, I think every “pay to unlock the capabilities of the hardware you already bought” is literally criminal (and by “literally” I mean “actually literally, not figuratively, and the FTC is failing to do its job by not prosecuting it”) no matter how much it gets normalized. Second, in this particular case it was unlocked from the get-go by default, so Sony would’ve had to forcibly lock it first and then try to charge for it, which would’ve been somehow even more blatantly criminal!
The real alternative here would’ve been for Sony to take the fucking L and comply with the law. They could’ve revised future units to not support OtherOS (as they, in fact, did), but forcibly removing it from units that had already been sold was absolutely beyond the pale and should’ve been stopped.
Their plan was to make up the difference in game sales. You were paying full price with the cost shifted to the games to trick you into thinking you got a bargain.
If I sell you a hot dog for $1 with a business model that you will buy an overpriced soda 5 minutes later at the stand next door, I don’t get to take that hotdog back after sale when I see you didn’t also buy the soda.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy, and it was quite normal for consoles to be subsidized with that exact goal. They needed systems affordable enough to get into homes, otherwise there’s no user base. No user base means no opportunity for game sales. No game sales, and it ends up as the Dreamcast.
So it starts to sound like their big mistake was ever allowing Linux and general computing to begin with? Sony were the only ones doing that even while the competition was an actual x86 machine running some form of Windows. Users still had to buy a PC to use office.
Companies (and governments) saw an opportunity for cheap computers that outperformed traditional servers and took advantage of it. Now no one gets Linux.
Selling at a loss is fine. What isn’t fine is coming back later and grabbing the hot dog, a hot dog you already paid for, out of your hand because you didn’t buy the soda a while later despite nothing in the hotdog purchase that required the purchase of a soda.
They sold it with Linux and then later grabbed it out of the customer’s hand.
If that’s the real price and the games are then also $25 cheaper, sure. They’re not giving you that money for free, the average consumer spends the same amount on the system+games either way. If they decide to use a misleading pricing strategy to manipulate people they don’t get to complain when people use products they bought differently to how they were intended.
The ps3 was an oddly specd system with little documentation for developers. It was overdeveloped and under utilized. Could have saved on r&d with the cell processor and gone with normal architecture eg ps4 and 5.
Edit to add that the cell processor was best at floating point calculations rather than raster graphics pipelines. So the best use case scenario were things like folding@home or the Linux os server stream.
I think I’d rather things cost what they need to cost, rather than games being expensive because the console was cheap. That way the manufacturer won’t be so invested in what you do with it after the sale, and you’re not getting scammed on the software pricing.
Okay well you go try convince the general public to pay $1000 ($1700 today) for a toy. Your primary competitor is using games to subsidize their hardware too at $300 but completely locked and unable to perform general computing. Good luck.