^ its not about sony being stupid.. its about making wrong descisions..
-sony is not a benevolent hive minded creature its a international corporation with thousands of employes..and thus it rises and falls with the competence of its people and the ability to forsee and propberly react to any occuring problems .
and mistakes are only natural and some grave mistakes have been made regarding the pricing the distribution and the advertising of the console
its just a example of how a bad launch can insure a well established product the similarities between the launch of the ps2 and the p3
- both had a exorbitant launch price that was partially justified with the introduction of new technology (dvd - blue ray)
- both had a rather boring array of launch titles (remember "THE BOUNCER" of course you dont)# both had a lot of word of mouth advertising thanks to the previous console being so good in games and lifetime
- both arrived only after other next gen consoles had been released already ( ps2 -dreamcast) (ps3 - 360- wii)
now lest see what was different
since sega is the master of lack of adverrtising the dreamcast didnt get much attention and people decided to wait for the ps2 instead...
whereas many people got tired of waiting another year for the ps3 and bought a 360 or a wii instead.. plus all the bad rumors before the console was finally released ..about the hardware being prone to malfunctions and the general lack of quality for a 599$ piece of hardware
sony did very little to counter those rumors and unlike the ps2 they did very little advertising once the launch was actually happening thats why many people didnt even noticed that it was finally avaiable for purchase
another thing that has been going on is the general attitude of sony pr...sony seemed to rely on the product name alone to work in order to sell the console "we made 2 successfull consoles before thats why you will want to buy the ps3 just because" and that attitude has been going on for the last 2 years along with taking jabs at nintendo and microsoft instead and downtalking own mistakes
tl.dr : sony expected the console to sell itsself just because its playstation no 3.. and even though microsoft policies are sometimes dubious its not all because they "bribed" or "bough" off all of sonys former 3rd partie supporters and dlc
