The third console curse: Which was the biggest stumble?

[curl-6]

Wman1996 said:

curl-6 said:

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. 

As I say, I think that has more to do with how the companies in question responded; PS3 lost the 7th gen war, but Sony learned from its mistakes and was much more successful in the next round.

On the other hand, MS failed to properly contain and repair the damage Xbone did to their brand and let it fester, and while Nintendo did learn some key lessons from N64, their gameplan for the next generation was even worse.