PS3's New Back-Compat Limit Outlined

We spoke last week about the EU version of the PS3 having a more limited backwards compatibility offering than its US and Japanese cousins. Now, via Gamespot, Sony's Phil Harrison has clarified what kind of support the machine will be offering. His comments in an interview on the 'semi-official' ThreeSpeech blog state that emulation of the PS2 won't be a huge barrier to backwards compatibility. "Our thinking involves being able to bring the latest hardware specification of the PS3 to Europe, although that does mean an initial slight reduction in the number of PS2 components. But it's important to put that into context: there will still be thousands of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 titles playable on the PS3 at launch ... The situation is changing every day, but on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1,000 PS2 titles." Harrison goes on to say that they'd likely be concentrating on 'big' titles, and that they generally don't consider back-compat very important in the grand scheme of things; in their view people buy the PS3 for new games, not old ones. If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, there's an opinion piece over at Next-Gen that completely agrees with Harrison's statement. Colin Campbell penned a missive entitled 'Why Sony is Right', and lays out what backwards compatibility looks great on the side of a box, but just isn't that big a deal.

Comments

PlayStation consoles break.

[tepples]

Sony stopped making the PSone. Sony is expected to stop making the PlayStation 2 Slimline before the PS4 comes out. So after the optical drives in existing PS1 and PS2 units wear out, what are players supposed to use?

Re:PlayStation consoles break.

[despisethesun]

I see you've never owned a PS2.

When do we decide?

[Quaz and Wally]

Final thought - it would be fascinating to see a commercial test of consumers having to actually pay for BC. Having forked out a significant amount of income for the hardware, how many would pay an extra $30 or so to play all their PS2 games?

I'm sure many people would have liked to have paid $30 dollars less for a PS3 with no backwards compatibility. The question is, why is Europe paying more instead?

At least to my knowledge, I haven't heard of the EU PS3 being cheaper, but rather more expensive.

Re:When do we decide?

[Volante3192]

$30 bucks is nothing compared to another $120 PS2 when it breaks. My former roommate was always playing PS1 games on his PS2, it was like half and half. I camped out for the Wii basically because I was getting a Gamecube (a $100 piece of hardware) at the same time and currently been playing a lot of GCN games I missed out on because I didn't have one.

Plus without backwards compat, you would need to keep both consoles hooked up or swap cables out. One box is just one set of cables and cuts down on the clutter.

It might not *seem* like a selling factor to analysts, but real people have different ideas.

As a PS3 owner

[fistfullast33l]

I'm going to say this is a big deal in the short run, but not a big deal in the long run. In two years the library will be large enough for the PS3 that few people will be using their PS2 games that much. Right now, however, the library is much smaller and so PS2 games definitely substitute for that lack of games. I myself have bought a few (I didn't own a PS2) since getting the PS3 and have had no problems since the 1.5 update.

I'll temper the statement with the fact that a lot of great games are coming out in the next two months or so, including Motorstorm, Enchanted Arms, MLB 07 The Show, and Lair. That's coupled with the two fighting games that just came out and older games like Oblivion and FEAR, neither of which I've played for various reasons. So this might not be as important right now as I think.

Re:BC = good for gamers, bad for companies.

[HappySqurriel]

Not everyone rushes to buy a new videogame system in its first 2 years ...

For third party publishers backwards compatibility is a huge feature because it means that it is safe for them to begin working on a title for the previous generation system even after the next generation hardware has been released. If you were 3 of 24 months into the development of a PS2 title today you'd be very upset if you found out that Sony's PS2 Backwards compatibility strategy was not going to allow your game to run perfectly on a PS3.

Fine with me.

[Ant P.]

I'll just stick to the console I bought last year, which plays my last-gen games just fine.

Re:It's not always going to be 1000 games

[Have Blue]

Sony will be constantly upgrading the software emulation

it's a hell of a lot better than the XBox 360's backwards compatibility

Actually, it's exactly identical to the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility.