News for Monday, 26 February 2007

The playstation 3 will arrive in Europe on March 23, 2007 (same date for Middle East, Africa and Australasia). If Japanese and american consumers could have been frustrated due to the low amount of PS3 initially available, European consumers, adding months of delay, will in addition only have a PS3 "light".
Indeed, european PS3 has been downgraded and will lack the "Emotion" engine as well as the graphics synthesizer (EE+GS) chip necessary to provide hardware-based backwards compatibility for previous generation Playstation titles. To ensure a minimal back compatibility, Sony has developed a software-based solution, a kind of emulation, but it will have an impact on both compatibility (not 100%) and performance. What was the reason for such a weird change? Money. The PS3 cost much more than initially projected, and SONY is trying to save the last cents on all components.
For sure it will not help SONY to gain back some credits among consumers, when the Wii has such a large success in Europe that one could have to wait for 10 weeks to get one, not sure that SOMY PS3 will be as successful as the PS2.