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Comment by philistine

4 hours ago

You are 100% correct but they started clamping down on people using Dev mode strictly for emulators and homebrew. So here we are.

This is what killed Linux support on PS as well, Sony was disappointed with what was being done with PS2Linux, instead of indie titles.

Hence why PS3 Other OS no longer did hardware acceleration.

  • The 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

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