The third console curse: Which was the biggest stumble?

[KrspaceT]

While a lot of the points on the X-Box One are quite valid, the Saturn's issues are overstated, and some people have made good points on the 64, I do wonder if the PS3 might prove to be a more severe one in long-term.

The PS3 basically killed off the bulk of Sony's 3rd party exclusives outside of a few publishers like Atlus and Capcom, and the latter might have been kept along by financing a few titles in part. With the 360 fixing the 3rd party issues and having actual 1st party games at the time as headliners, Sony had to go into the exclusives race, and hard.

Now I'm a Nintendo fan, I would never consider exclusives a bad thing and Sony makes some good games. But Sony took to a very different approach to them that started at the end of the PS3 era with The Last of Us: the biggest, flashiest, most expensive productions short of GTA, while reducing their focus on smaller, more niche game types to a point Ratchet and Clank is basically the last of a dying breed. And that, as has been shown recently, is not healthy or safe and is starting to cause some real issues.

PS3 might top the list in a few years if this continues to go. If nothing else I suspect that without the PS3, we'd never have gotten Sony buying Bungie, Helldivers 2 (not a bad thing, just a reflection of how live service games and Sony have developed), or Concord.