The third console curse: Which was the biggest stumble?

[Wman1996]

curl-6 said:

Qwark said:

PS3 it pretty much evaporated all profits PS1 and PS2 made for PlayStation. Xbox One sold 58 million and was still profitable or at least did not nearly lose as much money as the PS3.

Yeah, while Sony did eventually recover from the PS3, I'd say that had less to do with the size of the stumble itself, which was enormous, and more to do with taking the right steps to course correct in the years that followed.

In the first 3 years of the PS3, it lost Sony an insane $5 BILLION, losses it never managed to recoup. It also lost them nearly 50% of their market share, and their position as market leader.

By contrast, N64 lost around 35% of SNES's market share, and Xbone about 32% of 360's share, and neither bled billions the way PS3 did.

PS3 won the war, so to speak. PS4 and PS5 have been very profitable, and some of the PS3's course corrections helped with that.

N64 and Xbox One did not bled the billions PS3 did like you said. But some of N64's mistakes were echoed by the GameCube, which did worse. And even some of Wii U's failings can be traced all the way back to N64 (the kiddy image, less friendly to third-parties, etc.)

And as I said before too, most of the shortcomings of Xbox Series X/S go back to Xbox One.