this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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I don't blame them as much for that one. It's a bad look, but the PS3's architecture was such that they could be used to make a cheap supercomputer and they were being sold at a fairly significant loss.
The cheapest way to build a supercomputer was to have a bot farm buying a bunch of PS3s, and don't wouldn't be able to recoup the losses through software sales.
They should have just sold the ability to unlock OtherOS for "X" dollars to offset the loss.
Yeah, but then you get into the "so, do I actually OWN my own hardware, or don't I?" debate
Also, the fact that they disabled it AFTER it being a selling point they advertised, for people who ALREADY bought them, without a way to revert
Anyway... Yeah, I don't take that as an adequate excuse. You sell the hardware, you no longer own it, so stop breaking it or forcing people to use it a certain way.
I get what you're saying, but I can also totally see Sony's POV that they were losing money on every unit sold. It was becoming popular enough for distributed processing/supercomputing they had to either stop supporting the Other OS feature or raise the price when they were already by far the most expensive console and way behind the much cheaper competition in sales.
They could hurt the minority of users who were costing them money by removing OtherOS, or they could hurt everyone by increasing the price of the console by a couple hundred bucks. Between the two options they absolutely made the better decision from a business standpoint, and it was also the better decision for 99.9% of the users.
Sure... But breaking the feature for people who ALREADY bought it was absolutely the wrong call. For people who that's the only reason they bought one (or more) that got the update before realizing what it would do basically wound up with expensive bricks as far as they were concerned, with no real recourse
It's user hostile no matter how you look at it. They chose to set them up as loss leaders, and that's always a risky gamble, one which they lost.
New sales? Sure, remove the feature, it's costing them money (though I again refer to my earlier point about hardware we buy not actually belonging to us), but leave the systems that already have it intact.