Ahead of the Leipzig conference, Sony has announced that they will be offering pink variations of the PSP and the PS2 in Europe, according to reports on GamesIndustry.biz. In the European territories, Sony already offers the PSP in both black and ceramic white, so this will be the third color offering for that territory, while the US has yet to see anything beyond the original color. The new PSP color will be offered in a bundle similar to the original US launch, with headphones, pouch, and a 32MB memory stick included. The bundle will retail for 169 GBP. Also announced was a pink variant of the slimline PSTwo, which will ship with dual controllers and a 8 MB memory card for 129.99 GBP.

At the same time, Sony announced that they would be lowering the price of the standard slim Playstation 2 to 94.99 GBP, or 129.99 Euro. Sony appears to be echoing their hardware strategy that they followed when the Playstation 2 was originally released. By still strongly supporting the old hardware platform while launching the new, Sony can extend the life of the Playstation 2. Game developers will find it hard to ignore the massive user base for the PS2, and if Sony can nail backward compatibility for the Playstation 3, this can allow some fresh content to appear while the truly next generation software trickles in. This approach is in large contrast to the way Microsoft handled the Xbox 360 launch; new Xbox hardware is hard to come by, and the platform itself has been pushed into the background quite quickly.