• Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think CD-i and 3DO should be counted for this.

    The 3DO had a weird business model and the price point was considering it didn’t sell at a loss like most consoles do – It didn’t catch on because it was a weird interstitial thing that was more powerful than the then-popular SNES/Mega Drive but leagues less powerful than the (already announced, already on the way) PS1 and Saturn.

    And the CD-i? That one didn’t even intend to be a games console at first. Philips was trying to make a ~multimedia machine~ out of a belief that those 90s interactive encyclopedia/activity center CD-Roms that were popular on PC were the future of consumer media. It was priced like a high-end media player, because that’s what they meant for it to be. They only pivoted to games at the ass-end of its lifecycle in hopes of salvaging the unmitigated disaster that had turned out to be. And when they did, they did so with a redesigned model that had a lot of the high-end features removed to “console-ize” their multimedia player, making it much cheaper.

    • MudMan@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Hey, they were both advertised alongside the rest of the gen 5 consoles, they absolutely count.

      But hey, if you’re gonna be that guy AND ignore the post-PS3 consoles that all launched at higher prices, how about the Neo Geo? Because that launched at $650 in 1991 money.

      The point is that no, the PS3 does not hold “have the dubious honor of most expensive console at launch” by any definition of that concept.