Sony would be doomed by now if that was the case

If Xenogears wasn`t a perfect game beyond your understanding, would you still not buy it?

But a Team Ico game was announced, its called "The Last Guardian", how didnt you know that?

I'm not sticking up for MS in any way, they screwed the pooch royally early on with their failure rates.  That said, PS2 was probably the least reliable piece of electronics ever made, so I don't know how Sony could possibly have a reputation for solid hardware.

Either way, I kept replacing my PS2 every time it broke, and replaced my 360 when it got RROD, so clearly I don't care much about hardware failures, just about the gaming library.  So even if PS3 had the Xbox-like fail rates, it probably wouldn't have made me want one any less.

 
I don't buy shit that fails me, period. Yes, everything fails sooner or later, but there are limits to what someone can put up with just for liking or loving something. If something fails once, that's hard but I can bear with it. Then it fails again, now that mechanical thing is going to have to go through hell and back to get my love again. However, knowing beforehand a certain product is KNOWN, PRONE and VERY LIKELY TO FAIL, that’s a whole different story. That’s just asking for it, and being stupid. I respect myself better than that. If I had purchased a 360 (I was very close a few months after it was out, but I was put off because of the proprietary small HDD and lack of games) and it had failed me back then, I would’ve kept it and repair it, however as soon as I had known Microsoft was KNOWINGLY shipping out defective garbage that was bye-bye baby, c’ya later! I have my pride, and there’s nothing I hate more than being taken for stupid or being cheated on a deal.

If the PS3 were just as defective as the 360, I wouldn’t have one. I would be patiently waiting for a new design or a whole generation of consoles, or I would content myself playing PC or portable games (no Wii for me). If my current PS3 totally fails today, I will be waiting for the rumored PS3 slim, whenever that comes true, or I’ll try buying one for real cheap. I just know for FACT a PS3 total failure is a rare occurrence, so I would give the bastards at Sony a chance. However, if lightning were to strike twice on the same spot, I would definitely not buy again.  After all, I skipped close to 4 years of the previous generation during which I only cared about finishing some games, and it wasn’t because of hardware issues or lack of games or money. I was just into other things, and gaming interested me very little enough to have any gaming system collecting dust, so I sold my PS2, bought a Xbox and rarely played any games on it for 3.5 years. I used it frequently as a media center until last year, but rarely as gaming machine. I can live without a gaming system, and I can certainly live without overpriced, defective garbage.

Yes, I would have bought it. But that would have been very crap indeed, maybe I would have bought an additional one as reserve. :-/

I think anti-PS3 coverage within the media would have been double or tripled (which would then have been justified, unlike entry pricing or so so launch games, such bad reliability is IMO serious), so I think the PS3 would then sell less for the long run.

They'd have fixed it by the time I could have afforded it. Well, only recently I've been able to afford one alone and still haven't bought one. The one "I" have now is shared with my brother who paid the other half of it. Anyway, this question doesn't seem that important after all since I would have got the console only after it was fixed - I'm not much of an early adopter, it's too expensive.

The PS3 wasn't selling well anyway during the time when the RROD was running rampant and it was because of the price point. If the PS3 had debuted at $600 AND had the RROD (it does have the YLoD problem, which has been coming up a lot more in web forms lately) it would have been dead meat. If the PS3 would have debuted at the same price point as the 360, it would have been fine. People still bought the 360 in droves when the RROD was at its worst. They would have bought the PS3 too.

Don't forget--the mass majority of people who buy consoles don't have any idea about this kind of stuff. They don't read gaming forums to find out about failure rates or hardware defects. A lot of that mass majority is just parents buying consoles for their kids. They're mostly going to look at price. Someone I work with bought her daughter a launch 360, which RRoDed, and her daughter didn't even bother telling her about it. She just switched back to her old N64. She found out by accident, and didn't even realize that MS would fix it for free.

These are the kinds of people who buy most of the consoles--so again, if the PS3 were at a lower price point, hardware defects probably wouldn't have effected its sales too much. But so far price has been its worst enemy, and will probably continue to be.

Before launch I expected the PS3 to be unreliable because the PS2 and PS1 were. So yeah I would have still bought the system, because everyone knew how unreliable PSx's were and to always get an extended warranty.