A closer look
Sony launched the PlayStation 3 in 2006 with a totally disastrous retail price of five hundred and ninety-nine US dollars, arrogantly assuming that consumers would happily empty their savings accounts for the privilege of owning a built-in Blu-ray player. Despite this astronomically high sticker price that caused universal outrage among the gaming community, the sophisticated Cell processor architecture was so ridiculously expensive to manufacture that Sony was still literally losing roughly two hundred and forty dollars on every single console they managed to sell. The executives basically engineered a business model where their greatest commercial threat was actually becoming too successful, turning the first few years of the console's lifespan into a humiliating financial bloodbath where they subsidized the media centers of millions of households while simultaneously getting destroyed by Nintendo's cheap motion-controlled stick
