After Sony Computer Entertainment Europe dropped the bombshell that backwards compatibility for the Playstation 3 in Europe and Australia would be limited compared to the US and Japanese hardware, the company talked with Three Speech to try and justify their decision. As stated before, the company is changing the hardware to reduce costs. SCEE confirmed that the relatively expensive Emotion Engine/Graphics Synthesizer would be removed and replaced with just the graphics hardware, and Playstation 1 and 2 compatibility would be provided through a purely software emulation solution. Microsoft has taken basically the same approach with the Xbox 360, and while Microsoft supports a great number of titles, there are a number of popular titles left out. Sony still hasn’t made any announcements regarding the number of titles supported when the console launches on March 23. Sony promises nearly all PS1 titles, but PS2 title compatibility is still up in the air. A strong software compatibility list would do much to help Sony’s reputation in the territory, but one has to feel that if the emulation story was a strong one, Sony wouldn’t have raised a warning flag before launch.