Kuturagi may be gone, but Sony still hate you and want you to die

Submitted by TAR Tom on Sat, 06/10/2007 - 1:18am. Console | costs | sony

You may sense a recurring theme here. It's not that I think the Playstation platform is a bad one (it's not - apart from the PSP. Having now tried one, they are *utter* rubbish) but the lies, arrogance, and disrespect Sony show their customers is reaching unsustainable proportions.

You give a company hundreds of pounds over the years, investing in their console, their games, their peripherals. You'd think they'd make some sort of effort to give you recurring value? To, you know, keep you as a customer?

Nintendo have lead the way - check out the longevity of your favourite Gameboy cartridges, still able to be used in the DS.

The PS/2 did an excellent job in running Playstation games - top work there.

Yet what have Sony done now? They've launched a cheaper PS/3 with only a 40gb hard drive. They claim in order to make the machine available at that price point, they've had to cut backwards compatibility. Not 'reduce' or 'limit' - cut. As in remove.

Yep, if you buy a 'cheap' PS/3, you can't play any PS/2 games on it. Sony spokesbeing Nick Sharples justifies this with the claim that, as there will be at least 65 PS/3 native titles by Christmas, this is perfectly fine. In fact, "We have made clear on many occasions that our priority is on developing innovative new features and services for PS3 and not on backwards compatibility."

Yet, if we head back to 2006 - only last year - Sony's own Phil Harrison clearly and distinctly said "Backwards compatibility, as you know from PlayStation One and PlayStation 2, is a core value of what we believe we should offer. And access to the library of content people have created, bought for themselves, and accumulated over the years is necessary to create a format. PlayStation is a format meaning that it transcends many devices -- PSOne, PS2, and now PS3."

This becomes even more insane when you realise that Sony are losing money - on all models. Everyone is (apart from Nintendo) - highly advanced consoles are loss leaders to grab market share, and the manufacturers make it up from game revenue, licensing fees, and peripheral sales.

And the hard drive in the PS/3 is user replaceable anyway - Sony have always made a big thing about that, and the instructions for doing so are in the PS/3 manual. So Sony have reduced cost by fitting a smaller hard drive - 60gb down to 40gb is all of £10 difference at retail - and completely crippling the machine's backwards compatibility, forcing you to buy new titles for it.

This is a thinly veiled ploy by Sony to appear to give with one hand ("Look! A cheaper PS3! Stop whining about the price and buy it!") yet taking massively with the other hand ("Haha! You can only use brand new, hugely expensive PS/3 games on it! Check out our markup on *these* babies!")

It's a weasel tactic, and the fact that Sony feel comfortable with bare faced lies to the consumer about their 'core focus' for the system highlights everything that is wrong with the company.

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