After enduring a 5 month delay, European consumers will be happy to know that, on top of getting a bad deal price-wise, their version of the PS3 will also be crippled in comparison to the North American and Japanese ones.
In an effort to reduce costs, Sony is releasing the European PS3 using a new chassis, which is missing some components, including the Emotion Engine. The Emotion Engine is the chip used to drive the PS2, and by including it in the PS3, Sony guaranteed that 99% of their PS2 titles would work on the PS3, continuing their long-standing tradition of backwards compatibility (one of the key selling points of the PS2 was its backwards compatibility with the PS1).
European consumers will only be able to play games which work in software emulation mode. It is important to note that this was Sony’s original plan, to be able to emulate in software mode all the PS2 and PS1 games, making the most use of the Cell processor, and allowing them to cut costs by not including extra chips. Of course, they then discovered that the Cell chip was not going to be enough to allow them to emulate most PS2 titles. Because the claim of backwards compatibility was so important to Sony, they had to take the hit of including an Emotion Engine chip on board.
It is interesting to try and understand what has changed for Sony to back pedal on its backwards compatibility promise. Unless they are able to emulate in software mode the same quantity of games that would have worked in hardware mode, then European consumers will be getting an inferior console. From this article, it is clear that less PS2 titles will work on a European PS3 than an American one.
Three possible reasons present themselves:
- Either they have finally resolved their software emulation issues which is unlikely since unlikely since they are claiming it will only play a “limited range” of PS2 titles.
- Either through play test studies, or their own guesswork, Sony believes this will not be a significant issue for European consumers. Perhaps their tests have shown that only a very limited number of PS3 owners will play PS2 titles on their PS3. Or perhaps there are so many PS2 consoles out there that a PS3 owner is likely to already own a PS2 (and hence having no need for backwards compatibility).
- Or, finally, perhaps Sony is losing too much money on the PS3, and they desperately need to start clawing some of it back. The lowered cost of production, in combination with the higher price for consumers is sure to help Sony’s margin. Combined with the larger numbers of PS3s expected to be available at the European launch, Sony is sure to have a significant positive impact on its profit margin.
Until the software emulation mode is as fully functional as its hardware counterpart (or Sony starts shipping the same version of the console worldwide), Sony is still dealing a bad hand to its European (and Australian) consumers, once again treating them as second class citizens in the global games industry.
