The incredibly high price of the PS3 at launch cost it a lot of sales, and it took forever to come down. Both of those are direct results of the hardware cost of the Cell and BluRay drive.
Early on the Xbox also did a better job with game ports. People had very little experience using multicore processors and the cell was even worse. So often the PlayStation three would have a lower resolution or worse frame rate or other problems like that.
Xbox Live is also an excellent point. That really helped Microsoft a lot.
All of that meant Microsoft got an early lead and the PlayStation three didn’t do anywhere near as well as someone might suspect from a follow up to the PlayStation 2.
As time went on, the benefits of the Blu-ray drive started to factor in some. Every PlayStation had a hard drive, which wasn’t true of the 360. The red ring of death made a lot of customers mad and scared others off from the Xbox. And as Sony released better libraries and third parties just got a better handle on things they started to be able to do a better job on their PS3 versions to where it started to match or exceed the Xbox depending on the game.
By the end I think the PlayStation won in North American sales but it was way way closer than it should have been coming off the knockout success of the PS2.
Early on the Xbox also did a better job with game ports. People had very little experience using multicore processors and the cell was even worse. So often the PlayStation three would have a lower resolution or worse frame rate or other problems like that.
Xbox Live is also an excellent point. That really helped Microsoft a lot.
All of that meant Microsoft got an early lead and the PlayStation three didn’t do anywhere near as well as someone might suspect from a follow up to the PlayStation 2.
As time went on, the benefits of the Blu-ray drive started to factor in some. Every PlayStation had a hard drive, which wasn’t true of the 360. The red ring of death made a lot of customers mad and scared others off from the Xbox. And as Sony released better libraries and third parties just got a better handle on things they started to be able to do a better job on their PS3 versions to where it started to match or exceed the Xbox depending on the game.
By the end I think the PlayStation won in North American sales but it was way way closer than it should have been coming off the knockout success of the PS2.