this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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The PS3 actually ended up outselling the 360 slightly. Like, very slightly. Couple 100k units or so. It's probably the most balanced console generation in terms of sales.
Then Microsoft launched the Xbox One and Sony wiped the floor with them.
Honestly, if Sony just only added half as much shit to the PS3, like skip all those card readers god damn, they probably could've gotten away with being slightly more expensive than the 360. I mean, the 360 on launch didn't have an HDMI port, didn't have WiFi, none of the 360s come with a Blu-ray player (when movies just started being sold on Blu-ray and being a DVD player was one of the reasons the PS2 sold so damn well), you had to pay for multiplayer (I think that was in at launch, right?) and the console itself just kept bricking. Like, on a consumer side technical level, the only thing it had going for it was the controller. But, give it a year headstart and make it cheaper than the competition and that shit stops mattering for quite a while.
Slightly, yes. Most balanced generation, absolutely. Depending on who you ask and when you take the snapshot the PS3 got a couple million units ahead, on account of being in manufacturing longer in some regions.
No issues with the rest of your post, though. The original 360 didn't even come with a hard drive as standard, which I think people forget (but game devs had to struggle with for the whole generation, since back-compat with launch models was mandatory until very late).
The move of keeping it as cheap as possible and getting the money back in subscriptions proved very successful, though. I guess we're all paying the price of how forward looking that was, including Microsoft.
Now that you mention it the 360 would have made the most sense to ship with HDMI since the original Xbox was the first console to launch with Ethernet access built-in.
HDMI combined with a Blu-ray player, instead of a separate HD-DVD, could have given it the edge over the PS3. Although Blu-ray is/was a Sony technology they ended up having to do it anyways in the Xbox One ¯\_(ツ)_/¯