A/ Both Nintendo and Microsoft did well this gen, and with very different positioning.

B/ Sony on the other hand is third in the most critical aspects : financial / brand / userbase when, last gen, it "had it all"

What if the most rational explanation to A and B was in fact the freedom manufacturers were given by thei vocal fanbase ? Please consider the following 

1/ Sony's fanbase has been eversince PS2 been very vocal vs Shooters - so it was difficult for Sony to prioritize that segment

2/ On the other hand JRPGs in general, GT, and "hardcore" single player focus in general might have been extremely demanded by a core audience when the general trend is a disminish

3/ Casual had been in the early years, along with shooters, an "enemy" of the Playstation community - so the transition to a more open model with Move was somewhat contradictory with the initial "plan/demand"

4/ XBOX Live having been so criticized for it's paying gold membership it was hard for Sony to promote something else than a free PSN, technically and security wise inferior to what it could have been [Sony tried has now a hard time segmenting it's audience into pricing models. The initial attempt was Home and they were hoping to attract micro-payments on the user side and ad-placement on the partner side - despite the initial hype, the delivered service failed to gain traction illustrating once again the assymetry between the expected feedback as from core user base vs real feedback from effective and potential userbase]

To conclude, additionally to the strategic decisions/challenges of building a Trojan Horse for Blu-Ray and competing against itself [PS3 vs PS2 was a very slow transition], maybe Playstation was also affected by a somewhat radical userbase in both terms of influence to invest and restrictions of opportunities. MS and Nintendo, had in a way more freedom as MS was still building it's audience [which ended-up very NA oriented - the japan presence strategy failed] and Nintendo took the huge casual turn with success, at the cost of defying such a huge pan of it's core and potential audience expectations.

Please keep the discussion as high level as possible

I believe that sony just believed that their fans would continue to blindly buy and support whatever they did, which certain was not the case at all in the end and allmost destroyed the playstation brand.

I think you hit the nail on the head with sony fans being disgruntled by the playstation move, people spend $600, or in my country the equivalent to $1000 dollars for a unique experience when they bought a ps3, not for a wii clone.

Thanks ! I'll try to develop re-write and develop the post in few days and integrate all feedback. As you wrote the collaboration/dialogue between Sony and it's userbase is also the other way around, with Sony hoping a bit too much their userbase would just follow the PS3 business model and pricing. I'm really interested in how and where we can distinguish when Sony was mislead by fans and when fans were mislead by Sony. Anyway there is a clear disconnection otherwise the loss from past gen to this gen would't have been as such.

And yes, regarding the Move, that also was overpriced considering in the end it was not perceived as very different from the more accessible wii...

Sony was mislead by fans when it announced its console thinking its loyal soldiers would buy it no matter what, sony fans were misslead by sony themselves when they actually bought the thing and the best game on it was Resistance:fall of man for the good part of a year.

That $599 price tag whilst losing on every unit, Lack of AAA exclusives in the early years and a 1 year late launch are the reasons they suffered this generation. Luckily they got their act together and regained a lot of that money through software sales.

I would call it "Squeaky Wheel Syndrome" ...

The 10% most vocal of the 10% most "hardcore" gamers (probably) represents about 90% of the feedback that companies like Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony receive about their platform; and (probably) about 1% of the feedback these companies receive comes from the silent majority (80% of gamers). While these "hardcore" gamers may have some good ideas, they're also willing to make trade-offs that are unacceptable to the silent majority; for example, paying $300 more than they paid for the PS2 so that they can have a powerful system with a Blu-Ray player.

To make matters worse, Sony is a company that is dominated by its hardware engineers. These engineers are more interested in producing amazing technology that strong consumer products so the demands from the vocal 1% for impressive technology get listened to; and even if the marketing team has done the necessary research and claims it is a bad idea to release a $600 console the engineering team is empowered to ignore that because of the structure of Sony.

while i plan on getting a ps4 and had planned on getting a ps3 sony fans really make me not want to support sony products.