arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070223-8912.html
It looks like the PAL Playstation 3 won’t include the chipset necessary to play Playstation 2 games that the US and Japanese versions of the console do. However some backwards compatibility will be provided via software emulation, as was done with the Xbox 360. What a shame.
So, how many times exactly have they shot themselves in the foot so far?
I don’t think there’s any foot left about now 
I can’t think of any logical reason why they’d do this. Anyone care to help me out here?
They’re penny-pinching tight-arses? Just a guess.
IIRC it was always the plan to transition to software emulation, it looks like the PAL system has become the guinea pig for that? Lucky Europeans…
Yeah I heard about that off gamespot and even I said ‘Have you not embarrassed yourselves enough Sony?’ despite being adament about getting a PS3 since day one. I am still getting one but I just hope Sony either don’t bother making another console or really get their arses in gear for the next console. I actually think that one day I will see ‘Sony cancel PS3 in Europe’ somewhere. I might just avoid this messing around and import an american PS3 near christmas.
Well if they are comitted to delivering on the backward comaptibility field then this doesn 't need to be bad news.But since we all know what emulation means…
And yeah it’s kindda cool to know we are the ones they are confortable with as far as experiments are concerned… 
“Europe may be the first region to get PlayStation 3 consoles that lack the PlayStation 2 Emotion Engine chip. It has been claimed other territories will also get the machine later this year as Sony strives to boost its profitability.”
Oh dear.
Isn’t that what Solo’s link said more or less?
waits for abadd to post a clever/annoying point on how this is actually good for sony
It will… uh… perhaps it… um… =p
Hm. Quite hard.
In all seriousness, though, I can only hope that this will mean that we will have a price drop on the PS3 soon.
No chance of that happening, Sony made that perfectly clear in various statements after that was known… Cost reduction does not translate to price reduction.
Weill it obviously will translate at some point. Still, if things don’t radically improve for PS3 soon, they’ll have to try something desperate or something radical. Which could be an early price drop, or possibly push the boutique angle even more somehow. Again that’s just my own vague fantasy scenario, if they tried to make the platform into a true PC alternative, almost like a gaming oriented Mac.
Blatantly not true. The PS2 is $130 in the US right now, all possible due to cost reductions.
Yes, over 5 years after release. You will not see a price reduction on the Euro version of the PS3 at ALL from the announced price even though ALL the units shipped here will lack hardware backward compatibility. Maybe next year or in 2 or 3 you will, but not now, even though the cost is already reduced. That’s my point, not that they will never, ever, reduce the price… Of course it’s easy to make that statement basing it on the last 3 words I said rather than look @ the rest of the post and the subject on hand which is price reduction due to the removal of the chip…
The fact that the Blu-Ray technology costs so much will make it difficult to drop the price, even with the removal of the PS2 chipset.
IMO, Sony would have been better removing the Blu-Ray drive from the PAL PS3, and shipping the games on DVDs instead (or if necessary 2-3 DVDs). The Blu-Ray drive could have been sold later as an add-on for watching high definition movies. Best of all, the game playing side of the PS3 wouldn’t suffer.
But you’re forgetting the whole point, if they didn’t use Blu-Ray the games would suffer. With Blu-Ray you get more space so the games would automatically have better graphics, sound, and gameplay than any DVD game duh!
gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=106508
Oh no, another reason we won’t need so big file sizes… is technology against Sony?! Procedurally generated content first, midi now, what’s next that will reduce the need for huge file sizes? 
All I see is an empty article with lots of comments. o: Care to elaborate?