Damage to the brand was insignificant. Only people who think PS3 negatively are forum nerds who understand sales and follow company's earnings. General public have no idea 

It's fairly common for company to make zero profits for years Anyways. The bussines model Sony did during PS1 and PS2 days were not sustainable, system architecture was becoming more and more standardized their days relying on third parties were over. PS3 was important for Sony learn more about the gaming market and to adapt to solidify their current position

This is all beyond the point though. The reason why I think PS3 do not belong here is because it's the opposite of all other systems in the thread. There was never a point of no return for PS3, PS3 not only recovered but end the generation with Sony stronger than when it's started 

It's point of no return was selling far less than PS2 and being in third place almost the entire generation. When looking at the 7th Generation itself, it in some ways still got third place because Xbox 360 sold more software and PS3 lost more money than Xbox 360 did. 

For PlayStation home consoles, PS3 is a sales blemish. It wiped out the profits of previous consoles, sold under 100 million units, and was constantly overshadowed by Xbox and Nintendo. 

To put it in another way; The PS3 was such a massive failure for Sony that it actually led to the PS4 being the generation when Sony actually earned money from gaming, due to the fact that PS3 erased everything they earned during PS1 and PS2 generations. PS3 basically just made everything that happened during PS1 and PS2 irrelevant from a money earning perspective, which will be what Sony cares about.

if the point of no return should be what the previous system reached, than every console which performed decently worse than it's predecessor should be on here too. The point of no return for the thread is the point of no good sales. PS3 did decently fine in the end. It hasn't gone down as the others, which were in the 10-30M. Even XB1 is doubtful. It hasn't gone down so much as sales lifetime, It took the xbox brand down for sure in the long term, but sales were still mediocre, better than failed ones, or low. Almost 60M it still okayish.

Then change the name of the thread to "Profit numbers point of no return" or something like that, because sales wise PS3 did pretty well and actually turn around a terrible launch 

PS3 sold only 20% less than PS1. And probably will sell around 20% less of PS5 too. PS3 sales are good even for Playstation standards. Something blemish is something like Game Cube, Vita or Wii U

PS3 may not have been a flop per se but it was a massive decline from the PS2 and broke Sony's winning streak so I think it's fair to include it here.

It's kinda similar to systems like N64 and 3DS in that it lost a lot of ground but still managed to escape being a total loss.

For me growing up as a Wii U owner. The point of no return truly came after Smash Bros came out and sales were still slow.

I remember during the Wii U era there was still a decent amount of confidence amongst Nintendo fans that the console would make a comeback in terms of sales once the new games came out like Mario 3D World, MK8 and Smash Bros. As people were thinking the Wii U will have the same fate as the 3DS where it started slow but still finishes strong once the games come out.

After MK8 came out and we saw Wii U sales jump twice as much that whole summer selling 60k units instead of the usual 30k before and even outselling the Xbox One in some instances, it gave me a bit of hope that sales would comeback once Smash Bros and the holiday season came around. However, after the Wii U still failed to sell that holiday, I think 2015 made it clear to us that the Wii U was done for, if Smash Bros and MK8 couldn't save it. Nothing would.

For the GC, I think the point of no return came after Windwaker was revealed to have a "kiddy" cartoony artstyle. OOT was a major success and system seller for N64 and the thing that could've appealed to the more mature audience on the GC which was Zelda turned into a kiddy looking game. Reinforcing the kiddy image that hurt the GC even more. It was clear that the GC was done for after that especially since the other major games like Mario Sunshine, Smash Bros, and MK released already up to that point.

However, you could also easily argue that the GC fate was sealed even well before it launched. Nintendo gave their biggest competitor Sony a huge 18 month head start for the generation. People already trusted PS way more to start the gen after being hugely successful with the PS1 and you essentially let them get an 18 month headstart. By the time the GC released, most gamers already made up their mind on getting the PS2. It was the sequel the hugely successful PS1 that contained backwards compatibility, the only fully trusted option when it came to 3rd party games, a DVD player which was the new hot thing at the time, and a much bigger library thanks to its head start. The GC's fate was set before launch arguably.

For the Gamecube, I think that system was doomed the moment Sony gained the market lead in the 5th gen. The Gamecube was the console the N64 should have been in 1996 rather than the console that was needed in 2001, and by then it was too late to win back those who jumped ship to Sony or got into gaming with the PS1 just by finally adopting disks, even if the console was again more powerful than Sony's. The Gamecube was Nintendo trying to fight the previous war instead of the then-current one. Even in a perfect world where the Gamecube launched at the same time as the PS2 with the same DVD support and used the same size disks so it could get all the same multiplats, and even if it by some miracle could keep the same low price it had in 2001 while having all of this and the same powerful hardware, it would still have finished a very, very distant second to the PS2 and I think its upper limit would have been the N64's sales totals. Its best-case scenario would have been to slow the decline in Nintendo console sales for a generation.

Yeah, the Gamecube was basically dead on arrival due to Nintendo's brand being lower than ever before, the Gamecube was pretty good hardware for its time but it didn't matter because the PS brand was just so strong and the Nintendo brand was so weak at that point that nothing Nintendo would have done back then would have made any difference.

Looking back its incredible that Nintendo made such a comeback with the Wii, because during the Gamecube it looked like the would be the next Sega pretty soon.

The difference between Nintendo and SEGA was that SEGA was bleeding money off of their consoles selling them at huge losses like their handhelds, their peripherals like the CD and 32x, the Saturn, and especially the Dreamcast. So even when the Dreamcast got off to a hot start, it came at a cost to their revenue and profits, with the losses proving too steep to overcome and then when the PS2 was revealed and launched, that was all she wrote for SEGA in the hardware market.

Nintendo on the other hand, with 1 or 2 exceptions, has always sold their consoles at a profit from the get-go, so even though the GameCube sales were underwhelming, it was still profitable, same with the N64, and during this time, while their console lineup was weak, their handhelds were a totally different story. The Game Boy lineup from the OG to the Advance was still very strong and carrying them - This new thing at the time called Pokemon was to thank for that.

If the Wii didn't take off like it did and proved to be another failure or decline, then at worst, Nintendo would have stopped making consoles and just stuck with handhelds much like how Sony eventually stopped making handhelds after the Vita's failure and just stuck to consoles. And if they stuck to handhelds, we'd most likely eventually reach the point where we are now with the Switch.