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PS3's Back-Compat Loss Explained, Analyzed
The news came down last week that future low-end PS3s won't have any backwards compatibility features, and that surprised a lot of onlookers. In response, Sony UK's Ray Maguire has attempted to clarify their logic. Essentially, in Sony's view, the money spent on back-compat features is better spent on developing new games or reducing the price of the console. "When PS3 first launched, Sony felt that backwards compatibility was an important feature as there were relatively few games for the new system, Maguire explained. 'So it was a big decision," he said of facility's removal, 'and we know it is a very emotive subject as lots of people think that backwards compatibility is high on the agenda and yet few really use it.'" For more on this, Joystiq has a few words on the implications of Sony's decision, while Kotaku says the 40GB unit will be arriving in the US on Nov. 2nd. For those of you who already own PS3s: would you have purchased a unit if it didn't have BC? If you don't have one yet, does the removal of BC make you less likely to buy one?
While at the current moment I have slight regrets of having bought a PS3 so early, I certainly don't regret the better visual quality that playing a PS2 game on a PS3 provides...God of War and Shadow of the Colossus look stunning being up-scaled, and run just as smoothly as they did on the PS2 (unlike many xbox games on the 360...then again, the 360 uses software emulation)
In light of a combination of the games that are available now for the PS3 and how long it will be until other stuff is available, I'm very glad I got one with extensive back compatibility...with it's current state of exclusives, no way would I have bought one without the ability to play PS2 games on it.
Living With a Nerd
I've held off getting a PS3 specifically because there's a lack of quality games. However, I don't own a PS2, and stuff like God of War has always intrigued me. If they removed backward compatibility, the only reason I'd buy the system would be gone.
Microsoft and Nintendo, for all their faults, have at least recognized one basic fact: games first, everything else (e.g. Blu-Ray) second. Not the other way around.
Seeing as an authentic PS2 can be had for ~$100, if the new model is more than $100 less, I'm more likely to get the new model. Otherwise, I'm less likely.
Backwards compatibility is important, but mainly in the first six months to a year after a console launches. You have to get people to buy in and them not having to keep around another console to play older games is one of the ways to do that. However, the longer the console is around the less important it becomes. People typically play less older games as time goes on. Obviously there are going to be a handful of, "classic" games that people love and will continue to play for years, but the vast PS2 library is largely relegated to history as more new games are released.
Frankly Sony's biggest single problem with the PS3 is its cost. No matter what you get for the money, it's more money than many people are willing to pay and that keeps PS3s out of homes. Anything they can do to reduce costs is going to help them at this point, and removing some of the components that they are removing is doing just that. Yes they already have software emulation of the Emotion Engine, but supposedly there were still some other hardware components that were used solely for PS2 emulation. (I don't have any hard links, so if that is incorrect I apologize. I had read it previously.)
I was upset at first as well. But after calming down and thinking about it:
Sony continues to sell PS-ONE systems (for pretty cheap too) so it's unlikely they're going to stop selling PS-2 systems any time soon.
Incorporating a PS-2 inside of the PS-3 does increase the cost by about $100 (even with software emulation)
The major barrier to PS-3 acceptance (aside from games) is the cost.
Most PS-3 purchasers are already going to have PS-2s.
Sure, I'd like an all-in-one box (actually I already have one) to save more space in my entertainment center. But I already have a gamecube/wii and an XBox/XBox360 pair on my stand so a PS3 with one of the new tiny PS2's isn't that big a deal for space.
Logically, its a sound business trade-off to get the price down to increase sales. Prestige-wise it certainly hurts, but maybe that's all fluff anyway (The XBox360 certainly doesn't emulate all XBox titles and the Gamecube never emulated the Nintendo-64)
(I know the Wii plays all gamecube games, but I keep the gamecube around because it's easier to use the corded gamecube controllers during a party rather than pulling the Wii out of its base)
Yes, there is. There are actually 2 chips in there. The EU PS3 that only does software PS2 emulation actually still has a second chip in there still. The new PS3 removes that chip as well, and they apparently have no plans to try to emulate it.
That doesn't mean they can't change their minds, but years of unofficial emulators has show how much work it is to emulate a chip with good speed, especially when the architecture is different. IIRC, you need 10x the CPU power to emulate a different architecture at full speed.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It wasn't done completely at the software level; the PS3 could emulate the CPU (somewhat), but still needed the PS2's graphics chip. Now that the graphics chip is being removed, backwards compatibility is no longer possible. The PS3 simply doesn't have enough power to emulate the entire PS2 anywhere near real time.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The current US versions have the CPU and Graphics card of the PS2 in the box (reported to cost SONY $27 total a year ago), while the original EU models had only the Graphics in hardware and emulated the CPU. Now they are removing that too. ;)
I will not comment on these facts, as I will be called a troll again
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Let me get this straight. Their console is doing worse than both of their competitors, and they're going to catch up by removing features that consumers want?
Makes sense to me.
The X-box is dead, end of story, but the PS2 STILL have games being developed for it, first class titles too. One of the things the "old" ps3 could do, is take these new PS2 games and upscale them a bit, it can't do magic but with its more modern hardware it could give it a slightly better visual quality, not unimportant if you have a HD-TV.
How can a game that has yet to be lreased already be assigned to history?
In an odd way, Sony has created Microsofts problem with the PC. Sure sure, MS could WISH Vista was the new OS and everyone would just buy Vista only games and publish Vista only games, but the reality is that the market has far more XP games, even 2000 games, yes 98 games STILL being sold, among them, games published by MS itself.
So your argument falls flat, the PS2 isn't retired yet, and for Sony to remove compatibility with the PS2 from the PS3 means that this christmas, some of the hot game titles out there, will have people wondering if they should get a PS2 or a PS3. The economy ain't all that, can you guess what a lot will decide?
But surely everyone who wants a PS2 already has one? Then explain why the PS2 sales keep ranking near the top? No, this is very similar to MS and Vista when people really want to run their XP software.
As for the costs, they already got a working design, if they just focussed on that and made that cheaper they could have saved themselves far more in bad publicity. Sometimes you need to accept that a few bucks saved don't matter when its costs you a fortune in lost sales.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As I posted elsewhere in this discussion, a teardown revealed that the HW cost difference between the embedded HW PS2 and its SW emulation is about $30.
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make install -not war
I don't see why its such a big deal.
You're obviously not price sensitive to the PS3.
People bitched like all hell when the PS3 cost $500/$600 USD - so Sony goes and tries to make it cheaper to produce so that they can pass some of the savings to the customer - and what do people still do? They still bitch just as much if not more than before.
People were upset because they felt that they were not getting the appropriate value or 'utility' for a set of features at a certain price point. Sony didn't listen. They thought that it was about the price. It's not. I spend six hundred dollars on a lot of things. Just not a video game console. Once you take out the features, you're introducing a new comparison. Now you're comparing a new set of features at a new price point. This is a different set of data to work with, for which Sony introduced a whole new set of unpredictable data. The sane thing to do was to either up the features at the same price point (another controller, another game a killer game) as an option or keep the features the same at a reduced price point. That way people can actually see their value or utility increase with a reference point that stays the same.
The problem that makes the PS3 expensive isn't the BC. It's the blueray player. It's unreasonable that Sony would require it's customers to pay for its own R&D and marketing costs and then take out other features just so it won't lose money on its money pit that is the blueray device on the PS3.
It needs to take a lesson from the 360. The 360 introduced more features at the same price point while at the same time adding features at a reduced price point for its older models.
Now one can argue until the cows come home whether there was actually added value in the HDMI and the 120 gb hard drive for the elite. The answer remains fixed to how the change was perceived. The 360 change was perceived as either "meh" or "positive". Whereas the PS3 change has been perceived as a ripoff. This is par for the course for Sony in this generation's video game console wars.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
Even if the Wii gets downloadable content, the experience will still be inferior without a better mass storage solution. Either you cough up for several gigs of flash media (hassle), or they have an external USB mass storage drive (expensive), or they do a hardware revision (splinters users into 'haves' and 'have-nots').
I don't think downloadable RockBand/GHIII content on the Wii will ever be comparable to the experience you'd have on the PS3, or X360.
And this is coming from a guy who's ONLY new-gen console is a Wii.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I'm sure Sony claimed they could pull it off at some point, since they tend to wildly overstate the capabilities of their devices while early in development. But in reality, the Cell's massively parallel architecture isn't well suited for emulation (a very serial problem) and HLEing the entire Graphics Synthesizer to offload it to the RSX chip isn't likely.
But from a less technical perspective, Sony's engineers have had a long time to try and offload the PS2 functions from those chips and avoid this PR headache. If they had any intention of finishing such emulation, they would've done so by now.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
that Sony doesn't seem to give a rat's ass - or much less even have something remotely resembling a clue - as to what the gaming public actually wants instead of the crap they seem to want to feed them?
Seriously now:
PSP gamers want the open platform to be able to extend it. They want a ported version of Opera or some DECENT browser (which would be easy enough to program, and the memory wouldn't be an issue if you used the memory stick as swap space). And they want decent games.
What does Sony do? Constantly push "updates" that break compatibility and try to fuck over the homebrewers who are making the killer apps, and try to push "sales" of PSX titles that require buying a fucking $600 access-box (PS3) to even get to.
Look at the PS3. Compare the shitty "Sony Online Store" to the ease-of-use in Wii or Xbox Live. Compare the crappy "games" (if you can call them that) offered by Sony to the games available on the other two consoles. Look at the half-assed "motion sensing" they threw in at the last minute to try to compete with the Wii.
Anybody else remember "people will be taking second jobs just to buy our console-aru!"?
Sony is the new Daily Radar - they have their heads so far up their asses they can probably smell their own tonsils.
...because:
1. I have a ton of PS2 (and PS1 for that matter) games that I both continue to play, have not finished, and am waiting for the price to drop down far enough on, so I can snap them up. The only saving grace of the PS3 as I saw it was consolidating 3 boxes down into one, and that's pretty much nonexistant now.
2. There are now so many different versions of the PS3, I don't feel comfortable trying to figure out what exactly I'm freaking getting if I go get a refurbed/used PS3. The guy behind the counter at GameStop might tell me this is one of the ones that would play PS2 games, but do I know that for sure? Do I want to chance the day or more of frustration returning it would incur for me if the one I got turned out to be a version that wasn't what I was promised?
I don't have any of the three next-gen consoles. The first one I get is most likely going to be a Wii (100% backwards compatible, interesting controller and gameplay, way cheaper). However there are some games coming out that are making me think about one of the more powerful consoles (since I don't feel like upgrading my PC anymore) and Sony is making it harder and harder for me to make that purchase a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360, even with the rampant hardware failures on 360s.