PlayStation 3

• 1. Introduction

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  The PlayStation 3 launched in Japan on the 11th of November 2006, and within 24 hours Sony had sold more than 81,000 units. In North America six days later, demand was so intense that violence broke out at retail locations. Yet within months, the console Ken Kutaragi had called a supercomputer for the living room was sitting on PC World's list of the top 21 tech screwups of the year. How did one of the most anticipated game machines ever built become, in the words of one gaming outlet, a hate object reviled by the entire internet? And how did it eventually sell 87.4 million units, surpassing its closest rival to become the eighth best-selling console of all time?

• 2. A Console Built to Lose Money

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  Development of the PlayStation 3 began on the 9th of March 2001, when SCE president Ken Kutaragi announced a partnership with Toshiba and IBM to build the Cell microprocessor. Four years later Sony confirmed the console's two other critical partnerships: Nvidia would supply the graphics chip, and Blu-ray would serve as the primary storage format.

  The decisions that followed were breathtakingly expensive. Manufacturing the 20 GB model cost an estimated US$805.85 per unit; the retail price was US$499. The 60 GB model cost US$840.35 to make and sold for US$599. Sony was losing more than US$240 on every box it shipped. Those losses, compounded across millions of units, contributed to SCE posting an operating loss of approximately 232 billion yen (roughly US$1.91 billion) in the fiscal year following launch. By mid-2008, Sony acknowledged cumulative hardware losses of about US$3.3 billion on the PS3.

  SCE president Phil Harrison would later reflect that at launch, $600 was actually too cheap given what the machine cost to produce. He declined to name the real manufacturing figure but said it would make your eyebrows shoot clear off the top of your head.

• 3. The Cell and RSX Architecture

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  At 3.2 GHz, the Cell Broadband Engine was unlike any processor found in a previous consumer device. It paired a PowerPC-based Power Processing Element with seven Synergistic Processing Elements, though only six were available to game developers. The seventh was reserved for the operating system. To maximize yield during fabrication, each chip was built with eight SPEs; if one proved defective, it was disabled by laser trimming rather than scrapped. Even flawless chips had one SPE intentionally disabled to keep production consistent.

  Sony's hardware team initially believed the Cell alone could handle all graphics tasks, and did not plan to include a dedicated GPU. Game developers, including Sony's own ICE team, pushed back. They demonstrated that without a separate graphics processor, PS3 performance would lag noticeably behind the Xbox 360. That feedback prompted a late-stage addition: Nvidia's Reality Synthesizer, paired with 256 MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, capable of outputting resolutions from standard-definition up to 1080p.

  The console was also the first in its generation to include an HDMI port and Blu-ray as its primary media format. Those two decisions would reshape the home entertainment industry, though neither came cheap at launch.

• 4. Blu-ray and the Format War

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  In September 2004, Sony locked in Blu-ray as the PS3's storage medium, a choice that put millions of game consoles on the front line of a format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. The Blu-ray drive alone was estimated to cost US$125 per unit during the PS3's first production run. Sony was, in effect, subsidizing the format's mass adoption through console sales.

  The gamble paid off. As the PS3 installed base grew, so did the number of households with a Blu-ray player. By the time the format war concluded, Blu-ray had won, and the PS3 had been a significant reason why. Early reviews consistently praised its Blu-ray playback; both Home Theater Magazine and Ultimate AV stated that its playback quality exceeded that of many dedicated standalone Blu-ray players available at the time.

  The GPU cost roughly US$129 per unit alongside that Blu-ray drive, which helps explain why even a 70 percent reduction in manufacturing costs by August 2009 still left Sony estimating a loss of around US$37 per Slim unit at that model's launch.

• 5. Games, Developers, and a Difficult Platform

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  Resistance: Fall of Man led North American launch sales and was named PS3 Game of the Year by both GameSpot and IGN. In Japan, Ridge Racer 7 topped launch charts. Europe's launch on the 23rd of March 2007 offered 24 titles, with MotorStorm performing strongly; both MotorStorm and Resistance eventually received sequels.

  Despite those bright spots, the platform's complex Cell architecture frustrated many studios. Gabe Newell of Valve called it a total disaster on so many levels in 2007, going so far as to suggest Sony cancel the console entirely. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick argued that games generated better returns on the Xbox 360 and threatened to stop supporting PS3 if Sony did not cut prices. BioWare called that threat silly.

  Over time the library deepened considerably. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Grand Theft Auto IV, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, LittleBigPlanet, and Killzone 2 all helped shift perception. By E3 2010, Newell appeared on stage at a Sony press conference to publicly retract his earlier statements and announce that Valve's Portal 2 would come to PS3 with full Steamworks support. The platform's best-selling titles ultimately included Grand Theft Auto V, Gran Turismo 5, The Last of Us, and the Uncharted franchise, and nearly one billion PS3 games had been sold worldwide by the console's end.

• 6. Hardware Revisions and the Slim Turnaround

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  Sony officially revealed the Slim model on the 18th of August 2009 at its Gamescom press conference. The new chassis was significantly smaller and quieter, achieved partly by moving to smaller fabrication processes for the Cell and RSX chips. Manufacturing costs reportedly fell about 70 percent compared to the original model. Even so, with a simultaneous price cut to US$299, Sony was still losing roughly US$37 per unit at launch; that figure dropped to approximately US$18 by early 2010.

  The market response was immediate. Less than 24 hours after the announcement, the PS3 Slim took the top spot on Amazon.com's video game bestseller list, holding it for fifteen consecutive days. The Slim also removed built-in support for playing PlayStation 2 games, retaining only limited software-based emulation.

  Three years later, the Super Slim (model CECH-4000) arrived, trimming the chassis by a further 20 percent in size and 25 percent in weight. It replaced the slot-loading disc drive with a top-loading mechanism that reviewers widely criticized as feeling cheap. It offered storage up to 500 GB, plus a low-cost option using 16 GB of eMMC flash. Final production continued until the 29th of May 2017, when the last units shipped for the Japanese market.

• 7. Beyond Gaming

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  Researchers at North Carolina State University clustered eight PS3 consoles in 2007 using Fedora Linux and open-source tools. Dr. Frank Mueller, who led the project, acknowledged the system's 256 MB RAM limit but described it as a cost-effective entry into parallel computing.

  In 2010, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory built the Condor Cluster from 1,760 PS3 consoles. It achieved 500 trillion floating-point operations per second, making it the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world at that moment, and was used to analyze high-resolution satellite imagery. A year earlier, a separate group of researchers had deployed a 200-console cluster to crack SSL encryption in 2008.

  Sony and Stanford University also launched a Folding@home client for PS3, letting owners contribute spare processing power to protein-folding research for disease study. These applications depended on the PS3's early support for third-party operating systems. That feature, called OtherOS, was removed via firmware update 3.21 on the 1st of April 2010, citing security concerns. The removal triggered several class action lawsuits; on the 8th of December 2011, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg dismissed the last remaining count, though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later partially reversed that dismissal and returned the case to the district court.

• 8. Network, Outage, and Legacy

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  PlayStation Network launched alongside the console in 2006 as a free online service, announced at the PlayStation Business Briefing meeting in Tokyo that year. PlayStation Plus, the premium subscription tier, was unveiled at E3 2010 by Jack Tretton, President and CEO of SCEA, launching on the 29th of June 2010 alongside firmware 3.40.

  The network's most serious test came on the 20th of April 2011, when Sony shut down PSN entirely after discovering what it described as an external intrusion. On the 23rd of April, Sony disclosed that personal information for 77 million users may have been compromised, including names, addresses, email addresses, birthdates, and login credentials. Sony responded with a Welcome Back program that offered all PSN members 30 days of free PlayStation Plus, two free downloadable PS3 games, and a one-year enrollment in identity theft protection.

  By the time the PlayStation 4 arrived in November 2013, the PS3 had completed one of the more dramatic reversals in consumer electronics history. A console that had been written off as late, expensive, and incompatible had sold 87.4 million units worldwide, with 22.9 million of those in the United States, 30 million across Europe, and 9.3 million in Japan. Sony reversed a plan to close the PS3's PlayStation Store permanently after fan feedback in April 2021, keeping it operational even as the hardware itself faded from production.