PS3 to lose backwards compatibility?

Strange things seem to be brewing in the land of doom and gloom surrounding Sony's PS3. According to recent reports, the version of the system due to be released soon in Europe won't feature the hardware (included in Japanese and American systems) that emulates PS2 and PS1 games. Instead, "limited" emulation of the systems' games will be made possible through software.

When queried by 1up.com, the bigwigs at Sony responded with the following quip:

"This move is a part of our cost saving measures, similar to the wide variety of cost saving measures we have applied with both the original PlayStation and with PS2. In time this leads to a reduction in the cost of manufacture and over time allows us to reduce the cost of the PS3 to consumers."

It isn't all that shocking to hear Sony's looking at ways to make its monolithic system cheaper, though it's a bit of a head-scratcher that the change hasn't created a price cut for European gamers (it's going to be just as expensive as ever when it's released on that side of the pond).

American and Japanese fans of Sony's latest attempt to take over the world shouldn't get too cocky--word on the street is the hardware-to-software switch eventually will be coming to our shores as well. All of which means I won't be tossing away my slimline PS2 anytime soon...