It’s official (link > gamesindustry.biz). The Euro model announced a few weeks ago is coming to North America on Nov.2. It’ll be going for $399 USD, as expected. This would be the 40GB model that has no backwards compatibility whatsoever with PS2. It’s also missing 2 of the original 4 USB ports as well as the memorycard slots. (White version is Japan-only right now.) As well, it includes a Blu-ray copy of the asstacular Spider-Man 3, thus completing the vision of total font convergence Sony had for the bundle.

I’ve been thinking about this BC thing ever since the Euro version was announced. As much of a beating that Sony has taken lately, I see the removal of BC on the lower model as a big disappointment. It’s the end of a longstanding tradition of compatibility. One that Sony has claimed it would never give up before:

“…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.” – Phil Harrison

And now, not PS3. At least in one model. Which should be wonderful for parents. Why doesn’t God of War or Guitar Hero play in the new Playstation, again? Oh, we bought the gimped one. Shit.

The existing 80GB model also drops in price to $499 USD. At least that’s still around, although that still has only one half of the hardware P2 emulation chipset – the graphics synthesizer – so that’s not perfect, either. About 80%, from what I understand.

There’s tons of discussion out on the web about how important BC is. To some, it’s huge. Others, not so much. I believe Sony when they (now) say they want to spend the money on PS3 games and support. The Xbox 360 did ok with an extremely limited amount of backwards compatibility, also accomplished on a per-title bases through software emulation. But the Xbox is not a Playstation, with 100+ million of the previous units out in the world and zillions of games.

I’m glad I bought a 60GB one while I could. I have about a half-dozen games for PS2: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Bully, the God of War titles, FF XII…. there is no way in hell that I will give up those games. And there is no way in hell that I want to keep my PS2, slim as it is, hooked up next to my PS3.

But I am not the majority, by a long shot.

The thing is, BC is meant to smooth over a transition from one console gen to the next. Because there are never very many games at launch. Usually not for the first year, in fact. I don’t think that it’s an absolutely essential feature. It’s just highly desirable.

If I had to pick a feature to drop (the gamesindustry.biz author likened Sony’s SKU rearrangements to watching a pilot throw cargo from an overburdened flight before takeoff) I would have picked the same features. Dropping, say, WiFi – or even the HDD, which is the gigantic mistake that Microsoft made – over BC would have been worse. $399 is a fantastic price point for the PS3; it’s $50 more than an Xbox 360 Premium now, with double the harddrive space, and plays HD movies. It’s just kind of a shame to see the tradition go away.

Let’s hope that Sony plans on maintaining two models throughout the PS3′s lifetime: one with some PS2 compatibility for a little more money, and one without for a little less. As Stephen Totilo pointed out when he was on 1UP Yours last week, the games industry has this habit of throwing it’s own past under the bus on a regular basis.

(And as usual, N’Gai Croal has said it better than I could have.)