Another Sony lie.

[celine]

TheBigFatJ said:

outlawauron said:
I believe removing BC with PS2 games was a mistake, but I need to say that what Phil Harrison says does not reflect what SCEE might do.

He isn't in charge of any hardware. He's the software guy.

Actually, he's their PR guy. He's supposed to know the official stances of the company and be a mouthpiece for that. When he made those statements, Microsoft had imperfect backward compatibility and Sony wanted to get the word out that they would have no such problems. Every PS3 was going to have full PS2 hardware in it, after all.

They overstated their feelings on the issue. Money got tight and Sony needed to make the PS3 cheap. Now their super full featured machines would lose one of its most compelling features to save a few bucks, and Sony had to jump at it. The game here is survival, and without being at Sony and knowing every detail, we can't say whether it made sense to remove BC. But they had better have a damn good reason.

If Sony wants this new SKU to be the only one on the market (in Europe or elsewhere), then they obviously have a good reason for it. Perhaps it saves them a ton of money compared to the high end models. This would be nothing short of miraculous, but it still does alienate some of their customers who believed that backward compatibility would be a cornerstone of the playstation brand. And, yes, for many people this is a big deal. There is no denying that.

Ultimately, I think Sony saw that their strategy was failing and they refused to let it happen to them. They've some up with a radically different strategy -- a necessity to keep them from being relegated to 3rd place for the generation.

 Great post. It probably kill this thread.