by Playfuls Staff |
2nd March 2007
So there you go: Phil Harrison confirms on the Threespeech semi-official blog that around 1,000 PS2 titles will be available for the PS3’s launch in PAL territories, all made compatible through software emulation.[more]
I advise you to take the news with a big grain of salt. First of all, although 1,000 titles is an impressive number, it does
not offer any guarantees about
what titles will be made available and the proportion of PS1 or PS2 titles. Are we going to have God of War 1 for PS3? You can bet on that, it would be a huge mistake if Sony does not ensure software compatibility for this particular game, considering its huge popularity among gamers. Shadow of Colossus? 150% sure- with those amazing landscapes rendered at high resolution it will certainly get not a 10, but a 12 mark from the audience. Final Fantasy XII, Burnout 3, Devil May Cry, GTA- they’ll probably be software compatible too, and let’s not forget that Sony is continuously working on increasing the number of games, through regular updates, which will be automatically downloaded while connected at the PlayStation Network.
My first two questions here:
1. how many titles of those mentioned
will actually work without any glitch?2. what is the proportion of PS2 games in comparison with PS1 games?
When Xbox 360 offered backwards compatibility through software (not hardware) emulation, it did that with disappointing results. In short,
software emulation did not work appropriately and was eventually abandoned. What guarantees does Sony offer today for PAL gamers concerning the same matter in PS3? With all do respect to Sony fans, the Japanese company does not have a very positive history in keeping its promises about the next-gen console.
Sony delayed the PS3 in November 2005 (when its Microsoft-built rival Xbox 360 was launched) for March 2006. Then, at the beginning of March 2006 they delayed it again, triumphantly declaring that November 2006 will see a
simultaneous (yes, that’s exactly what they’ve declared) world-wide launch of their craved gaming console. And that they are expecting to sell around
4 million by December 31, 2006. Few months pass, with nothing but grim rumors about manufacturing problems, and in September 2006 they admit that the Blu Ray diode is very short in supplies and that they will have
only 400, 000 consoles ready for the US, and
only 100,000 for Japan. Oh, and they also launched the PS3 in Japan first, and only a week later in the US… And Europe had to wait until, March 23, 2007, to get a more expensive and less powerful system.
As if all this wasn’t enough, NPD Group reported that in Japan
only around 80,000 PS3 consoles were sold in the first week since launch (and there’s no reason to think that the rest until 100,000 remained unsold, considering the insanely huge eBay auctions that followed…) and
only around 197,000 in the US for the same first week since launch (I repeat,
all consoles available at launch were sold in the first week!). Despite the numbers, Sony officials were still confident that they will meet the target of having 1 million PS3s sold by the end of 2006. They have met it only in early 2007.
Dave Karraker, Sony’s spokesman, declared at that time:
"Are we worried about strong sales of the Wii or Xbox 360? Not really. It was a great year for the industry overall. With the tide all ships rise."Ok, I agree with the fact that Xbox 360 encountered difficulties too in the first months since its launch, with heating problems, red-circles-of-death and, yes, backwards compatibility issues. I also agree with what Sony says about the lifespan of a gaming console- about 10 years, and that PS3 needs time to win back the dominant position of the PlayStation brand. But things are different now:
Xbox 360 didn’t have rivals in the next-gen world when it came out. It also did not have to deal with the phenomenon called Wii, a thing which led to its massive adoption,
as the only next-gen console available. PS3 has to deal with rivals, insanely huge prices (especially for PAL areas) and massive losses with every unit sold. Not to mention the game developers’ increasing frustration with the lack of support from Sony for the Cell CPU programming (which has a complex architecture that is not yet being exploited by any of the games available for PS3) and the a rather lame line-up of titles until now.
And now the backwards compatibility issue. Let me just remind you two declarations from two Sony officials involved in the PS3-circuit:
1. Kaz Hirai:
“It's always been an important strategy of Sony Computer Entertainment that we provide value to the consumers; and one of the values that we're providing is the backwards compatibility of the PlayStation 3, to play PlayStation 2 games that the gamers and consumers have bought over the years, as well as the original PlayStation titles that have been available in the market since 1995. And I think that when we ask the consumers, or the gamers to make an investment in software, that it's our responsibility to make sure that the future consoles that we bring to market, including a PlayStation 3, is able to actually play all these titles that the consumers have really spent a lot of money in, and invested a lot of money into really a master library. And I think you're doing the consumers and the gamers a huge disservice, when you come out with a new console only to say, it only plays PlayStation 3 games; and that's really counter-intuitive to our strategy, but also, really to the Sony DNA who're always trying to provide compelling consumer value in any of the products that we launch."2. SCEE president David Reeves said that:
"PS3 is first and foremost a system that excels in playing games specifically designed to exploit the power and potential of the PS3 system. Games designed for PS3 offer incredible graphics quality, stunning gameplay and massively improved audio and video fidelity that is simply not achievable with PS and PS2 games. Rather than concentrate on PS2 backwards compatibility, in the future, company resources will be increasingly focused on developing new games and entertainment features exclusively for PS3, truly taking advantage of this exciting technology. […]The PS3 launching in Europe is every bit as powerful as the PS3s available currently in North America and Japan. PS3 is defined by key features such as the CELL broadband engine, its Blu-ray drive, the SIXAXIS Controller and its ability to output full 1080P HD game content which makes it an entertainment system for the future, without equal.”In order not to be accused of being some console fanboy (I actually love Sony for what they did with the PS2 and the PSP, and they have all my support for that matter) I will let you pull the conclusions.
Instead, I will give you some technical details about how software compatibility might not the optimal path
for gamers (for Sony, it saves around $27 with each manufactured PS3 and partially cuts Toshiba out of the production-and-profit circuit…and I also have this one dilemma:
if software emulation was the solution to cut expenses, why wasn’t it implemented in the first place in ALL PS3s? Is it because Sony already knows that software emulation is worse than hardware emulation and that they needed a good press until now? Or is it because they know PS2 will likely surpass the sales of PS3 even in 2008, and they want you to play PS2 games on PS2 and PS3 games on PS3, thus reaping profits from both?).
A software emulator (in general) allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written. Unlike simulation, which attempts to behave with as much accuracy as possible while having the advantages of simplicity and speed provided by simulation.
A hardware emulator is an emulator which takes the form of a hardware device. In computer theory, the Church-Turing thesis says that any operating environment can be emulated in any other, but in practice it is quite a difficult thing to achieve (especially when the behavior of the OS to be emulated is unknown and has to be reverse-engineered to be discovered- that is not the case with PS2 and PS3 emulation). Most emulators just emulate hardware architecture. But what matter most though in the PS2 Emotion Engine emulation for PS3 are the
timing constraints: if the emulator does not perform as quickly as the original hardware, the emulated software may run much more slowly than it would have on the original hardware.Console-game developers often use simulators in their work (which are pretty accurate in emulating the real hardware, but they are still simulators) because they actually need little direct addressability to the hardware. In PS3’s case, the software emulator for the Emotion Engine is produced by Sony, which should theoretically improve the way the simulator replaces the hardware component. But that still is no guarantee that
it will actually happen, given the complexity of the software.Things go like this: if Sony will write less code-lines to emulate PS2 games, that increases the chances of seeing more games working with the PS3. But by not going the emulation route with the graphics hardware as well, they may be giving up the greatest possibilities of software emulation in upsampling/resampling and higher resolution outputs, especially given the lack of a hardware scaler in the system. Unless of course they have a software solution in place to work alongside the graphics hardware from the old console, which is less likely.
Ok, enough with the technical details, the bottom line is that that despite Sony’s appeasing declarations
you can only hope for better and better compatibility, but not from the beginning. With the new updates they will only make your PS2 game behave better and better on PS3, but don’t expect that to equal the capabilities of the Emotion Engine.
