European PS3 will play fewer old games

Backward compatibility will not be as good as in the U.S. and Japanese models.

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[Dr. B]

Maybe it's just me

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to get the feeling
that Sony WANTS the PS3 to fail. While backwards compatability
may not be the biggest deciding factor for some people when they
pick a console, it's certainly not a non-factor either, and with sony
having already delayed the PS3 in europe for months already, this
can only be interpreted as more bad news.

[-fjtorres-]

Sometimes it seems that way, no?

Thing is, Sony has a problem on their hands: PS3 costs are related to the production rate and that is dependent on the sales rate. When they set the $600 price on PS3, they *assumed* a certain sales rate which has not materialized. It seems that they *really* did expect to sell 6 Million PS3 at $600 by now. (Talk about buying into your own hype!)

Having fallen short by half, they are now forced to either eat more in losses, raise the price, or take costs out of the design faster than allowed by conventional cost-reduction techniques.

The delayed European launch allows them to do the latter two; average pre-tax price in the Euro-lands is $800 instead of the $600 in the US (they're not shipping the 20GB version on which they lose more money than the 60Gb version), and now, they took out the embedded PS2 hardware that allows NorthAm- and Japan-spec PS3s to run PS2 games. That probably amounts to $50 in savings right there.

They're gambling that the typical euro buyer will sooner put up with these antics than buy an american console.

And they're probably right.