i will understand if they choose to do this.

at $399 they offer a ps3 that plays BR movies, ps3 games, dvd's, etc. It still has WIFI, something that will cost you an addtional $80+ on top of the price on any xbox 360 console. While lacking backwards compatibility, they recognize that with 45 million ps2's in the US, people who want a ps2 largely already own one.

at $499 they offer a ps3 that does everything the $399 model does with a few additional features, like being able to play your ps/ps2 games, bigger hard drive, card readers, etc.

While people on internet forums want to chastise sony for every move they make, this one seems nessasary. Their $399 and $499 price points have clear value differentiation. While it seems that core gamers want a $399 ps3 that plays ps/ps2 games, it also seems to if sony were to offer this they would find another reason why it sucks and choose not to buy (no dualshock 3,etc).

Here's my take - for a next gen console to NOT have backward compatiblity makes it useless to me, unless it has a killer library of games in its stable.

There were a few reasons I bought a 360 - and playing my 60 some odd Xbox games was one of the main reasons. As stated earlier by Apostrovich, I have a limited amount of space, TV plugs and the like - and I see no need to fire up my Xbox just to play my games. Sure, the 360 isn't great with playing old titles, but one thing I do respect them for - when the 360 came out, they weren't screaming '100 percent backward compatiblity' - they were saying it would play a lot of Xbox games. While initially I didn't like that, I accepted it. I still have PS1 games and though I never really play them that often, knowing I can always play them really makes me feel confident in my purchase.

FTR, I have over 50 PS2 titles and like 65 Xbox titles - and having a machine not able to play any of them would really suck. Especially now, as PS3 owners are waiting for AAA titles, not having the ability to play PS1 and PS2 games severely weakens the possiblity of PS1 and PS2 gamers making the jump to the PS3.

I even have a Wii - don't have a Gamecube, but knowing my Wii can play Gamecube games, I find myself eyeing Gamecube games I wanna buy.

Ah thanks. Still not knowing the source of the rumor, I see the point of the somethings gotta go mentality to drop the price, but dropping the BC just doesn't make sense to me.

1. I had assumed they had moved all regions of the PS3 to software emulation which means that there wouldn't be a need to drop any hardware.

2. BC compatibility is one of the things that Sony loves to boast about so it doesn't make sense they would drop it.

3. If they really wanted to cut cost and make you think you're buying something that's cheaper they would do what MS does with the 360 and take out the Wifi adapter and make you buy one. I would believe that much easier than them taking out BC.

As for the implications, I actually don't think it would do much. A good deal of people don't even know the PS3 is backwards compatible and you would only hear a stink from the people that regularly check sites like this or Kotaku or whatever which isn't the majority.

I think that put this thread to rest. As for everybody else, I told you so.

I have yet to find a single game that won't work on my PS3....I even ripped a Static-X cd onto it, and that had to have been the most messed up cd you ever saw. It still plays my original copy of GTA3, which is SUPER messed up, and it even loads it up faster.

There are several sources for this. The best one is Play.com, which is a very serious website and would not post rumours, since they are a retailer. As I said in my thread about the possible size reduction, most people who know about the PS3 hardware currently think that there's still some hardware left in it, which is necessary to play PS2 games, even with software emulation of PS2's CPU.

Anyway, the purpose of this thread is to discuss the consequences of such a measure assuming that it happens, so on topic:

I think this will definitely have its impact in the sales of this model, and in the perception of the Playstation brand in general. As people said, BC is an important feature, especially since PS3 doesn't have many games yet. Many people will either not consider buying this model because of this limitation, or if they buy it without knowing about that, they'll be pissed off afterwards, and may try to return their consoles. There will be 3 types of people buying this model:

1- People who don't care about PS2 games.

2- People who are not in group 1, but have a PS2 and don't mind leaving it in their living rooms.

3- People who not in group 1 nor 2, but want the PS3 a lot, and don't want/can't spend more than $399 on it.

I don't know how big those groups are, so I don't know what kind of sales this model can generate!

Who doesn't own a PS2, seriously? I have two that are at least five years old and run fine (after cleaning the DVD player to avoid disc read error, which most people don't understand can happen due to dust accumulation and ionization on just about any DVD player or CD player).

I don't think backwards compatability is crucial to system sales, like others here I think most people buying a PS3 are mainly looking for the new games, although there will definitely be disappointed gamers.

I do find it odd that software backwards compatability might not be included, that can't be all that expensive, and it's going to be done for the 80 GB system anyway, so maybe there's something else we're missing here. 

What did you tell us?  Your posts have been making less and less sense.  This thread assumes that BC is disappearing on this new model.  Are you positing that it wouldn't do much?

I would also disagree with twesterm on the "majority of PS3 users do not know about backwards compatibility" bit.  I find that very hard to believe.  With the large number of new gamers purchasing the Wii, I would expect a lack of knowledge on its users however for the target audience of the PS3, I would think that they more than any other audience this generation would know the capabilities of the console they're buying.

I dont see them taking out backwards compatibility.

Since this thread is backwards compatibility.

All of sony's systems can play ps1 games. And the ps2 and ps3 can play both ps2 and ps1 games.