Bastards!!!

[coldfish]

I dont know why anyone's surprised at this, Sony always -remove- features in their consoles over time.

Hard luck for anyone actually wanting/using those features.

Many of the "more interesting features" are just early-adopter fodder, once the console breaks the mainstream, Sony's loyal, premium-paying fanbase are soon forgotten.

It's a process they've gone through again and again and each generation the suckers come back for more.

-Cell started out as the "be all and end all" of CPU architecture and was quickly proven to be more exotic headache than paradigm shift.

-BluRay was plugged as the must-have format for HD viewing but it's now more meh than yeh.

The shine of Sony's hype soon wears off like chrome plating on cheap plastic.

Personally, I treat consoles as gaming appliances nothing more.  If they happen to be able to do other things, take it as a bonus but expect that the copyright owner can at any time take their toys away making the system unusable for those things.

[coldfish]

Ah well if it's any consolation, Sony have had a tough fight this generation and seem to have a death wish by alienating users every chance they get.

First it was bad pricing and the backward compatability issues, then lack of software and prolonged development cycles...

I doubt they'll ever see the success they had with PS2 repeated.

[coldfish]

The best way to punish Sony is to not buy their products.  Just dont.

I had a choice for highend laptop recently and automatically ignored Sony as a choice because I object their openly contemptuous marketing tactics.

Sony should stop and ask themselves how the f**k apple stole both online music and second place in handheld gaming from them when they were in both markets first?  And how they went from first place in two console generations to last place overnight?

[coldfish]

What's interesting is how quickly Sony can drop support for something they were using as a marketing hook only a short while before. It's unsubtle, and erodes any credibility they still had.

I'm all for Sony doing things like this however, as it will only alienate more consumers and in the long term that will come back to bite them.

Im glad Nintendo have dominated this generation, leaving Sony and Microsoft to scramble about trying to score sloppy seconds.

Maybe it will make them try harder next generation?