Sony screws up again with new PS3
Posted
Oct 18 2007, 01:31 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Sony makes some historic blunders. One of the biggest was making digital music players that wouldn't play MP3s, the most popular digital music format. Those devices played Sony's own ATRAC format, which the company killed a few months ago.
Sony hasn't learned from its mistakes. Consider the PlayStation 3, the too-expensive game console that hasn't become the hit the company wanted. Sony's finally selling a cheaper PS3 in the U.S., just in time for the holidays. It'll cost $400, but will have only 40 gigabytes of storage -- half that of the standard version, which is getting a price cut to $500 from $600.
That's fine. Some people don't need more than 40 gigs anyway in a video game system. But get this: the cheap PS3 won't play games made for the PlayStation 2. That feature is called backward compatibility, and it's a dealbreaker. A typical PlayStation 2 owner probably has a nice library of video games. The new PS3 won't play any of them.
It's not that Sony doesn't know how to add backward compatibility. Other versions of the PS3 will play past games. Sony is simply removing this feature in the cheap PS3. Nintendo made backward compatibility a priority with its popular Wii system. Microsoft was clumsier, ensuring that many, but not all, of its original Xbox games could be played on the Xbox 360.
Sony has been bragging about its backward compatibility capabilities for years now. "Backwards compatibility, as you know from PlayStation One and PlayStation 2, is a core value of what we believe we should offer," said exec Phil Harrison in an interview last year.
So what happened to this core value? Sony now says that backward compatibility "is a nice secondary consideration, but it's far from the number-one priority."
Sony can't have it both ways. If it wants people to part with $400, it needs to take another look at those priorities.
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