alt Hacker NewsThe PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.
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I would be curious to know more precise numbers. My intuition suggests that when Sony sells millions of them, the number diverted for non-gaming purposes is maybe thousands or tens of thousands.
> Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.
The PS3 was coincidentally locked down after it was jail broken (broken in Jan, otheros patched out in Mar.
The marketing win of being able to say "these are so poweful, the military literally uses them in supercomputers" certainly more than makes up for a hundredth of a percent of consoles having a zero attach rate.
The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...