Well they had Gran Turismo, which was arguably the biggest title on PS1 and PS2, rivalled only by GTA. Kinda sad how much the series declined.

Well, we may be talking past each other.  Legal obligations are different from a business's purpose.  The purpose of a business is to make and retain customers. 

However, you admit that chasing a quick buck is not really the right path.  That was essentially my issue with the PS4 in my first post.  PS2 expanded the gaming market as much as possible, and the PS4 did not.  They kept the price of their console high when they could have easily lowered it.  Not only does this exclude people from the gaming market, but it is not in Sony's best interest to keep prices high when that excludes significant customers.  The reason is that a competitor can easily come along with a cheaper price and take these customers for themselves.  These neglected customers end up empowering competitors.  By not serving them with the PS4, Sony may be shooting themselves in the foot for a quick buck.  On the other hand, if they just focused on serving their customers, and they lowered their system price, then they could avoid empowering competitors.  There are plenty of examples in other industries, where this very thing has happened.

A customer is nothing to a business if they dont have a wallet. PS4 maximizes profits from its customers, PS2 couldn't as it had to deal with piracy at the time and had no service model to continue to generate cash. Hence hardware sales (especially sold at a loss) means little if the customer is spending less. Also expanding upon the gaming market means little to shareholders if they are not generating profits. Each industry generates profits differently however the end goal is all the same. At a supermarket, companies lose money on Milk but rely on you buying other products like fruit which is sold at a profit. Sounds familiar to how hardware and software work doesn't it. Hardware is what gets the customers into the store, the software is the items the customers buy within the store to generate the profits. Ever wonder why some stores try to give you baskets at the door? So you impulse buy and carry more items, because that's where the money is.

I was removed from a bar once because i wasn't buying any drinks and i was taking up space, they knew i wasn't spending so they asked me to leave so they can get others into the bar who were willing to spend. See how important i was as a customer when i wasn't spending money.

Below is a good example of a made up scenario,

Example 1: Company (A) makes a games console, RnD was $3b to make. They sold 200m consoles at $100 each. They now hold the record of consoles sold and have the most customers with no Subscription model. Would you consider that a success?

Example 2: Company (B) makes a games console, RnD was $3b to make. They sold 100m consoles at $400 each, they also have 50m subscribers paying $100 per year over 5 years.

Both consoles were on the market for 5 years and sold the same amount of software. Who is more successful?

I was removed from a bar once because i wasn't buying any drinks and i was taking up space, they knew i wasn't spending so they asked me to leave so they can get others into the bar who were willing to spend. See how important i was as a customer when i wasn't spending money.

I can't comment on financial profitability or software sales, but if you gauge success by hardware market dominance then the PS2 is the clear winner by a wide margin in my view. The PS2 basically held 80% of the market share and not only beat but badly demoralized its competition.

Microsoft was really demoralized when they launched the Xbox360.

Nintendo was really demoralized when they launched the Wii.

This entire post is a strawman argument.  PS2 was profitable even when they dropped the hardware price to $99.

Seems like an awful place to visit

I can't comment on financial profitability or software sales, but if you gauge success by hardware market dominance then the PS2 is the clear winner by a wide margin in my view. The PS2 basically held 80% of the market share and not only beat but badly demoralized its competition. With the PS4, even if you consider the last generation as being PS4 + XOne + Wii U then the PS4 won about 65% of the market share which is very dominant but still not quite at the level of the PS2. That said, if you look at the last generation as a battle among PS4 + XOne + Switch then the PS4 isn't even going to be the winner in this battle. To make matters worse, the PS4 had its plug pulled on it basically immediately after the PS5 was released which is basically the first time that this ever happened with a Sony console (even the PS3 didn't fade away as quickly as the PS4 has).

Those of us who remember the first half of the PS4's life will remember that it was a very dominant console that maybe wasn't far off of the PS2, but if you look at the second half I am seeing a console that was beaten quite soundly by the Switch as well as being a console that had a rather ungraceful exit from the market. At the end of the day, the gap between the Switch and the PS4 is likely going to be quite a bit larger than that gap between the Wii and PS3 was and that is the number people will look back upon when judging the winner of the last generation.