I don’t know why people claim Sony sold off Crash and Spyro... The games were co-published between Sony and Vivendi Universal, but the IP’s belonged to Vivendi Universal. When Activision bought out VU in (I think) 2000, they purchased the IP’s with them. Sony only had a say in the titles they published; not the IP’s as a whole.
That being said, I think Sony’s biggest mistake was trying to build a console around an architecture that had never been used in game development before, without beta testing it for themselves. The PS3 launch was clearly rushed, and it felt like it took Sony waaaaaay too long to finally get the ball rolling, even with their own first party. I loved PS3, especially after it’s first couple years, but my god was the APOCALYPS3 real in those early years.
0331 Happiness is a belt-fed weapon
