Sony. They were insanely arrogant in the PS2 era. Worst designed console for devs to work on. 2 controller ports. Very faulty hardware. They didn't care as they knew people would flock to them. They carried this thinking with PS3 with the horrible marketing. $600 price tag. Told people to get 2 jobs. Said rumble was last-gen tech. They crammed a bunch of unnecessary crap in PS3 no one needed to justify their price. They said Nextgen doesn't start until they said it did. The PSP while I love it, had horrible racist ads. The memory stick was costly. Sony was not kind to developers and many bailed in favor of 360.


PS4 was a massive success so now with PS5 Sony started censoring Japanese games but not western as a double standard. Censor what you can tweet from the console. Still stingy about cross-play, even Nintendo embraced that. Jim Ryan telling people no one wants to play old games. Now they are locking people out of PS1 purchases. Tried to shut down PS3 store even tho MS keeps 360s open.



Don't try and bring up the Xbox One reveal. The thing is Microsoft has NEVER been on top. MS acted like that in THIRD PLACE. So as the topic asks who's the worst when on TOP is Sony.

If N64 was CD based and SEGA had not botched the US launch. Sony PS1 would not have had the same success. No CD add on in the 4th gen was a success so the Nintendo PlayStation would have failed. What hurt Nintendo was going cartridge in the 5th generation. Cartridges are why Square left.

In the context of the time period I don’t think charging for Xbox Live was unfair. The other two console makers didn’t offer anything remotely comparable and they were building out that infrastructure from scratch. We have gotten so used to the status quo where XBL and PSN are basically identical, but they really didn’t achieve parity until very late 7th gen/start of 8th gen, and Xbox users were more than happy to pay for what was, for the majority of the 7th generation, a vastly superior service. 

In 2022 though I don’t think either company should be charging for online anymore. 

And on the subject of micro transactions in games: those were coming whether we liked it or not, that was not an “innovation” invented by Microsoft but simply the logical next step in games monetization. 

There is a difference between Nintendo being a japanese company to their core and being conservative when it comes to emulation AND Sony who literally turns their back on consumers quickly af when they are in a good run.

I'm sorry but how Nintendo is behaving right now having the upcoming best selling console of ALL TIME isn't the most awful. They did make some awful move here and there, i would state the NSO expansion, lack of price cut on games, etc etc. But still looking at the price of the new MK8 dlc, transparency over the Zelda and Metroid Prime 4 delay, revival of Metroid with full marketing... i mean i feel like they have still care to keep that relation with their fans even if in the end they are a corporate.

How Sony has moved from PS2 to PS3's awful launch. But they did it again with how they went from PS4theplayers, being all for the fans and transparent, doing what's good for players to : rising prices for games on PS5, paying for upgrades of the same game to PS5, saying they won't do cross gen games, announce a full lineup (that was delayed over 2 years btw) on PS5 without mentionning it is coming to PS4 and making it so unclear that some might think they have to get a PS5 to play them, how they are starting to censoring games more and more, adding ads to f2p games... c'mon now. There is literally a ton more and i see a lot of consumers turning bc of that behavior. They feel so cold and arrogant lately and you can't tell me otherwise.

If MS shouldn't be part of the discussion, they definitely shouldn't have been listed in the thread title.

Xbox was never at the top, so this question doesn't apply to them 

Playstation was as the top during PS2 and PA4 and I found them pretty nice. Indeed I have no criticism towards Sony now, they are even releasing their games on PCs

So Ninty wins

MS Botched the Xbox hard because they also failed to "understand the market direction" and thought it was going always-online, TV/Streaming with a poor name that failed to communicate that it was a successor. - So it's the same as the WiiU in that regard.

As for the PS3, we need to keep context here...
Sony was on top with the PS2, so that arrogance flowed into the Playstation 3's design and release, hence statements like... "Our goal for PlayStation 3 is for consumers to think to themselves, 'I will work more hours to buy one".
The high price, inefficient and difficult hardware.. And most multiplats being inferior to the competition really put a dampener on Sony at the start of that Gen.

The difference of it all is, Microsoft has never been on top in the console space... But we still ended up with the launch Xbox One... I could only imagine what they would have been like if they had 80% of the market locked up like Sony did.

In saying that... And I have been saying it for years... I want all three console manufacturers to have absolutely identical marketshare for competitive reasons... It benefits us, the consumer most of all with more innovation, more investment, lower prices.

The 7th gen was one such generation... Sony did a massive turnaround on the PS3 and made it a worthy console, the Wii was great fun, the Xbox 360 had some real banging games.
End result was Xbox: 84 million, PS3: 87.4 million, Wii: 101.63 million... And regardless of what console you got, you were going to have a blast.

Bold 1: Misunderstanding the direction of the market to offscreen devices (which IS where the market was at the time if you look at all the "second screen experiences during E3 2012) is NOT comparable to attempting to control the entire ecosystem via an always online system functionality to prevent used game purchases and modular hardware. One is a misunderstanding, the other is anticonsumer. 

Bold 2: This is literally the equivalent of "We have a device for you, buy a 360". The difference is, the PS3 offered complete and total backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 on a hardware level, a Blu Ray drive that was actually relatively cheap in comparison to what you had on the market at the time, and it wasn't even drastically more than it's competition (20GB was 499.99, 20GB Xbox 360 was 399.99). Also, at the time, 360 did not offer HD DVD functionality without an add on (or Blu Ray of course), did not offer WiFi without an add on,  and did not have an HDMI input. Unlike the Xbox One to the PS4, what the PS3 was offering (A PS1, PS2, PS3, Blu Ray player, integrated Wifi, HDMI) was pretty good. The increase in price was worth it, despite being a lot for the time. The comment was a bad one for publicity purposes, absolutely. 

Bold 3: Absolutely agree with this as a concept. However, sometimes a manufacturer just deserves to have lower marketshare. For example, in no universe do I think the Xbox One deserved to have as much marketshare as the PS4. I do think that the original Xbox and Gamecube should have had much more marketshare than they were given, however. 

I think it's literally both. If MS anticipated 8th gen would go mostly if not full online, or if they could force that, then grabbing as much market share as possible would have been of upmost importance. This would explain why they wanted to basically force you to find a way to get online so you could be on XB One, and at the same time, be locked into their ecosystem where they didn't have to be too generous. Since that didn't work out, look how more open and generous they've become.

The biggest PS3 problem almost has to be the entry price. Most console gamers are casual consumers and many of the purchases are made by the parents, who don't want to spend any more than they have to as long as their kids will still have fun. Value doesn't mean much to most once the asking price is just too high. Since that didn't work out, look how they solved the price problem with PS3 Slim and every console since.

Yes, in general, the closer the major competitors remain in terms of market share and profits, the more it will benefit the gamers, and yes, when any company is asking for it, they deserve to pay for their negative actions so they become more reasonable or so they don't do it again, period.

Bold 1: : "if they could force that" that is exactly the anti-consumerism I am talking about. There was no need at the time to force an always online connection. 

Bold 2: Most early adopters are neither casual gamers or parents. In fact, Sony was pretty famous for going after the over 20 crowd in comparison to their contemporaries. 

Bold 3: I'm not stating they deserved higher sales. I'm stating that, in comparison to the Xbox One, PS3 had a value associated with its higher price point. Xbox One had kinect to blame for its expense, PS3 had blu ray functionality, PS1, PS2 BC, and wifi out of the gate. In comparison, I can see why PS3 was more costly.