I think that one was also significantly a publicity thing, they made videos and announced it as a neat story about the air force doing something “neat” and connecting relatable gaming platform to supercomputing. I’m sure some work was actually done, but I think they wouldn’t have bothered if the same sort of device was not so “cool”

There were a handful of such efforts that pushed a few thousand units. Given PS3 volumes were over 80 million, I doubt Sony lost any sleep over those. I recall if anything Sony using those as marketing collateral to say how awesome their platform was. The losses from those efforts being well with the marketing collateral.