Last week when Sony announced new PS3 hardware for PAL territories, the company revealed that this newer version of the console would not have the same backward compatibility feature with PS2 games as the PS3 model currently on sale in the U.S. and Japan. In an interview on the semi-official Three Speech blog, Sony Comnputer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison has responded to public outcry, promising that "on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1,000 PS2 titles."

"It's very easy to over-react," he added. "We're working to introduce a resource on the Web to detail which titles will have backwards compatibility. And as we make firmware upgrades, we will be able to add to that list." Specific titles have not been mentioned, but it's assumed that the more popular games from PS2's vast library will make the list first.

The bit of good news, as pointed out by Three Speech, is that this decision to remove the PS2 Emotion Engine chips from the PS3 could help lower manufacturing costs a little earlier than Sony would lead us to believe. That said, Harrison would not comment specifically on price reductions. "...we strive to get the cost of manufacturing down as soon as possible, and as soon as we can pass cost savings onto the consumers, we will," he said.

Sony executives have repeatedly said that they have no plans to slash the price on the system. In a recent interview with GameDaily BIZ, Harrison said, "...the PS3 technology, as with any of our platforms, starts off life at a high price and then we engineer cost out of it. And that process is an investment that you make to combine chips into a single chip or to reduce components or combine components and redesign things, and that investment is part of our planned R&D effort to reduce cost. At the appropriate time and when we can afford to, the business model of the industry is to pass those savings onto the consumer, but we're a long way away from doing that yet."