Sony Dropping Euro PlayStation3 Chip

Sony Corp. is removing a chip from the European version of its new PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console, a move that cuts costs but means users cannot play some of their old games. The PS3 is to go on sale in Europe on March 23, following its North American and Japanese launches late last year.

Unlike the PS3 being sold in the United States and Japan, the European version will not carry a Sony-made microchip that offers graphic- and data-processing functions for PS2 games, cutting production costs, said a spokesman for game unit Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). The console will still be equipped with a different chip that processes graphics for PS2 games, but the backward compatibility of the machine will be lessened, the spokesman said.

Reuters - Sony dropping PlayStation 3 chip

Instead of hardware support for old games, the paper (Nikkei) claimed, Sony will offer software that emulates the missing chip. This is the approach Microsoft took to allow the Xbox 360 to play original Xbox games, even though the two machines use entirely different and incompatible processor architectures.

Arguably, it’s an approach Sony should have taken from the start. The move should allow the consumer electronics giant to begin offering cheaper PS3s, to boost demand, at the cost of limiting backward compatibility, which many users probably don’t care about - they want to play new games, not old ones.

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