I’d been meaning to comment on this lately, but have been a bit too busy at work to get around to it. In case you haven’t been following, Ars has been a bit bearish on the PS3 as of late. Actually you could say anybody with an online presence in general has been fairly harsh (at least until GDC!). Of all the recent articles however, this one takes the cake.

To start off with, there’s this gem:

I suggested that Sony should have abandoned Blu-ray or, at most, should have made it an add-on, such as the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. The reason is simple: by pushing the console’s price into sky-high territory, Sony was stretching themselves dangerously thin.

Almost a year later, it’s completely obvious that Sony has stretched itself too thin.

Sony, stretched thin? Seriously, we’re talking about corporation that’s been consistently generating over $60-$70 billion dollars of revenue each year, and yet still remain profitable (albeit tight at times). SCE? Yeah you could say they’ve bitten off a sizeable chunck that may be hard to swallow; but Sony as a whole? C’mon… Is this fundamentally any different than the original Playstation or the PS2?

 To the typical armchair analyst/CEO/blogger, you might think hell yes! In reality it’s not. From a technical standpoint there are some differences, however as far as impact and/or scale of what they were trying to accomplish? Not really.

Yeah, Blu-Ray is the neat new format, but is it really that big of a deal with regard to the PS3. Personally I don’t think so. The PSP debuted with a new optical disc format (UMD), yet we didn’t see as much fuss over that (other that the typical grumbling over another format (strangely nobody grumbles when it comes to proprietary carts though…)). But really, how about building semiconductor fabs (PS2)? How about creating a whole new division and entering new, competitive market (Playstation)? With a bit of perspective, this whole ruckuss over Blu-Ray seems like a pile of nonsense.

However, this part seems the part where I take issue:

As we learned this morning, Sony is now bifurcating their product line even further, delivering a lesser product to the European market in order to save a few bucks. Dumping some of the dedicated hardware for backwards compatibility should save Sony a few greenbacks (or yen, as the case may be), but it screws gamers. And for what? How much cost is Sony saving by scratching this hardware?

Ken seems really upset! Don’t know why though. It’s not like you couldn’t see it coming! And even before this there was speculation and debate on how backwards compatiblity was going to be achieved. So why all the fuss? Iteratively trimming complexity in the system has been going on since the original Playstation. Japan got one with a nice little S-Video port on the back while the US didn’t (although I guess it was of minor consolation that S-Video/AV cable was made avaialble 4 months later). Later on, the composite jacks got tossed, then the parallel port, and finally by the PSOne, the serial port.

The along came the PS2… And when it came to the US, away went the PCMCIA port (although only used for an external HDD in which the US and EU models relied on an internal bay for). Then away went the firewire port (but along came IR!). The came the slim 7xxxx series with no HDD support whatsoever (ah but it did have an ethernet port in the back). However Sony had a little surprise for everybody in 75xxx. Out went the original IOP, to be replaced with a different one, and can you guess what that affected?

Another thing. I think Ken is underplaying the significance of shaving components off of a system. Removing the EE+GS saves you not only the cost of the chip itself, but also ancilliary costs such as the DRDRAM modules for the EE, board real estate and routing. It reduces part count which decreases complexity, which in turn reduces assembly costs. You might say it’s a bit of a trickle down effect.

With the PS3, Sony has let its video entertainment aspirations dictate the design of a gaming console, and the results are now plain for us to see: when the going gets rough, the gaming functionality gets going (going, gone!) out of the box. Buh-bye. Sure, now Sony will use software to provide some backwards compatibility, but not full compatibility. They’ve got a stop-gap measure in place, and we’re hoping that it works really well because who wants to keep an old PS2 sitting around once you have a PS3?

Really now… We need to lay off the Kool-Aid. Yes Blu-Ray is a critical component of the PS3. Dictate the design of the console? Please… Does the 360’s DVD-ROM drive dictate it’s design? In the end, it’s just a denser optical disc. As for the full compatibility? Here’s a news flash, the PS2 never attained “full compatibility” with the Playstation (in fact it PS2 games started breaking on later PS2 models!), and when it comes to the current PS3 with regards to PS2 compatiblity? Guess what? It isn’t “fully compatible” either. I hate to break it to you, but leveraging an emulator for backwards compatiblity has always been the target goal. Utilizing hardware has generally been a plan B that so far has worked out OK.

Really, the article is just plain poor… I don’t know what else to say…