alt Hacker NewsThey removed it because they lost money on every console sold unless you also bought some games. When governments/universities started buying thousands to use in compute clusters without buying a single game, it stopped being worth it.
They added it to avoid game console specific tariffs, so they must have run the numbers and realized paying those would cost less than subsidizing a bunch of clusters.
My recollection / impression was that Sony was quite happy to lose game sales on thousands of PS3s because "used to make super computers" was a marketting win for them. They were used in this role for several years until Sony started trying to roll it back immediately following the publication of game piracy related developments that in part used OtherOS vulnerabilities.