PS3 is proof positive: bad things happen when gaming isn't the focus

February 25th, 2007, 22:12 Posted By: wraggster

via arstechnica

Almost a year later, it's completely obvious that Sony has stretched itself too thin. As we learned this morning, Sony is now bifurcating their product line even further, delivering a lesser product to the European market in order to save a few bucks. Dumping some of the dedicated hardware for backwards compatibility should save Sony a few greenbacks (or yen, as the case may be), but it screws gamers. And for what? How much cost is Sony saving by scratching this hardware?

There have been several "tear down" estimates for PS3, the best of which comes from iSuppli. They estimate the cost of the Emotion Engine in the PS3 at $27. That's the chief hardware component providing PS2 backwards compatibility. Did Sony just jack with the PS3 over $27? Even if the cost were twice as much, would it be worth it?

With the PS3, Sony has let its video entertainment aspirations dictate the design of a gaming console, and the results are now plain for us to see: when the going gets rough, the gaming functionality gets going (going, gone!) out of the box. Buh-bye. Sure, now Sony will use software to provide some backwards compatibility, but not full compatibility. They've got a stop-gap measure in place, and we're hoping that it works really well because who wants to keep an old PS2 sitting around once you have a PS3?

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