I would say that ultimately success or failure is best and most objectively judged by how much money was made. So, the PS3 was a failure.

Calling it a failure because of the losses it made the first few years doesn't make much sense to me. Sony employed a loss leading strategy from the very beginning. They were selling the PS3 at a $200 loss at launch so they knew it would be years before the console managed to turn a profit. At the end of the day the PS3 sold over 80m consoles. The 6th most successful console in history, 4th if you remove handhelds. Only the Wii and Sony's other two home consoles had managed to surpass it. It also established a solid foundation and active userbase to quickly jump into the next generation leading them to create the fastest selling console in history.

Was the PS3 everything Sony hoped for? Of course not. But it was in no way a failure.

Sony lost money overall on console sales, so how do big console sales make it a success? Considering Microsoft lost money every year in the Xbox division, I highly doubt Sony made any money off of the PS3 (which in my book makes it a failure). 

I love when people bring up market share as a reason the PS3 is a failure. The PS2 went against 3 under performers in the Dreamcast, Gamecube and Xbox. The PS3 went against the Wii, the great fad console, and the Xbox 360 another highly successful console. PS2 sold 157.68 mil. If you replaced PS3s numbers with the PS2 it would look like this.

PS: 157.68
Wii: 100.9
Xbox: 84.4

Which would leave PS with only 45% of the market. In other words, in order to replicate the PS2s market share the PS3 would have had to sell over 500 million consoles.

That said I believe the PS3 still lost money for Sony so it certainly was not a success.

It made second place despite all the negativity,  bad press and year late launch,  so yes it's a success. 

Additionally the solid support in its later years while support for the wii had been dropped like a hot potato,  and support for the x360 became asthmatic,  aided the strong launch and early success of the ps4.

So when will you make a "Is the WiiU a failure?"  click bait thread?  Or is that one too obvious to get away with. 

Yes and no is the only possible answer. It failed in a lot of things and succeeded in a lot of things.

From a gaming community perspective it was a great success. It brought us some fantastic games and it is the 4th best selling console of all time, and in many countries it is the 2nd best selling only behind PS2.

From a corporate perspective it failed to turn a profit, and it failed to capitalise on the amazing success of the PS2. Though it did manage maintain a decent degree of popularity of the PS brand. And it did help to win the HDDVD/Bluray format war. While Bluray isn't as dominant as DVD became, because of the rise of digital distribution, it's still an important medium, and losing the format war to HDDVD would have been a failure of a different sort for Sony. Still the cost/benefit of that winning the format war is probably debatable.

Ultimately, though, PS3 was successful enough despite many failings. In later years it helped keep Sony alive, it ensured there would be an 8th generation Playstation console, and it carried the best momentum of the 7th generation into the 8th generation (which I predicted back in 2009).

Ps3 introduced psn, ps3 pushed Sony to develop first party studios on par or better than any other publisher in the game industry, ps3 pushed Sony to be innovative, ps3 in those aspects was a success, but ps3 also tarnished the PlayStation brand(but later Sony's first party studios brought it back), and wiped out the majority of money made during the ps2 era, so it was also a failure in those aspects

Since when was 80 million a failure? Sure its not 150 but this gen Nintendo and Microsoft were actually taking up part of the market and the PS3 had competition.

I don't think it was a failure, especially not as much of a failure as the Wii U, which was not nearly as much of a failure as the Virtual Boy.

Well sales wise, I'd call it a success. But financially, it will probably be the biggest console failure ever.