The just announced for Europe less expensive, 40-gigabyte PlayStation 3 is not backward-compatible with PlayStation 2 games. (It is compatible with most original PlayStation games.)

This model has not yet been announced for North America, but it is only a matter of time before it is. And this opens the possibility that in the future no newly manufactured PlayStation 3 will be able to play PlayStation 2 games.

This makes me more paranoid about my PlayStation 3 breaking than I already was.

I bought a PlayStation 3 earlier than I would have preferred because Sony announced that the then upcoming PAL-territory version would not have an Emotion Engine (PlayStation 2 processor), making the console less backward-compatible with PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games than the already released NTSC model. The Emotion-less (read: less expensive to produce) PlayStation 3 would surely find its way to the rest of the world and replace the existing Emotion-al models, and probably sooner rather than later, so I "needed" a PlayStation 3 immediately, despite few worthwhile PlayStation 3 games available at the time.

When my first PlayStation 3 broke a few hours after I purchased it, I became paranoid.

If my second PlayStation 3 broke (after GameStop's seven day period in which it replaces one's newly-purchased game console with another new console), and Sony decided that my system was beyond repair, I could be sent a new or refurbished PlayStation 3, possibly one with no Emotion Engine, making a portion of my PlayStation and PlayStation 2 game library useless.

Now I fear that I could lose the ability to play all of my PlayStation 2 games if my PlayStation 3 breaks.

Maybe this is for the better. This generation of game hardware is likely the end of the line for backward-compatibility. Sony and Microsoft have hinted that all content for their next game consoles will be distributed digitally. Digital-only distribution means no need for an optical disc drive, which is necessary for the (primarily) disc-based games of this and the previous two generations of game hardware. Removing backward-compatibility now prevents consumers from being shocked and angered when the next generation of game hardware cannot play previous generation games from the start.