[brookst]

Disagree. What was the revenue upside of the openness to start with? Probably less than $3.75m.

$3.75m is tiny to Sony but probably quite large for the group responsible for the loss. I know I've seen serious trouble at Fortune 10 companies over $3m issues, when the 6-person group's annual budget is $500k.

[yencabulator]

Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance. They averaged almost 12.5M units sold per year, which means a lot of game sales (where the money really comes from). They're the largest video game company in the world, and make about $2B earnings before interest and taxes per year these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...

[aleph_minus_one]

> Well for one, they got "free" marketing for PS3 by getting it associated with supercomputer performance.

At least in Germany's nerd circles Sony's behaviour rather lead to "so nie" jokes (explanation of "so nie": when you pronouce "Sony" with the first syllable like you would pronounce a German word, stress the second syllable, and put a little break between the syllables, it sounds like "so nie" [German for "never this way"]), and lots of people used this "little different" prounciation of "Sony" to express their disgust for Sony's behaviour. This "guerilla pronounciation" of "Sony" helped to spread quite some reputational damage of Sony among hackers and tech enthusiasts in Germany.