The PS3 didn't have a piracy problem for a long time because of Blu-Rays. For a couple of years after the initial hardware release, BR burners were prohibitive

The PS3 didn't have a piracy problem for a long time because of Blu-Rays. For a couple of years after the initial hardware release, BR burners were prohibitively expensive, and the bandwidth required to download a single disc in a reasonable amount of time was also expensive. There were several high profile hacks on the PS3 that allowed pirated games for a while, even before they removed the OtherOS feature(IIRC, one was a rather ingenious hack that involved tricking the USB handler in order to do a code injection). The real reason that the PS3 has such a big problem now is because, as we found out with the GeoHotz stuff, Sony didn't actually use any real security for the PS3. MS and Nintendo took hardware security very seriously. MS has basically made the 360 unhackable without a mod chip at this point through a lot of creative Hypervisor tricks. Nintendo had a similar level of security as Sony(lots of OS holes that have been patched up over the years), but they also use a non-standard disc encoding format, which makes traditional "download the ISO and burn it on a DVD" piracy a lot more difficult because very few DVD drives can actually read the discs to rip them.