Jack Tretton, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, has blamed "business minds" for problems with PlayStation Home.
Speaking in an interview, Tretton said part of the reason issues have arisen with Home stemmed from, "the disconnect of when Sony took Home out of the creative minds and put it the hands of business minds... but I would rather ship it two years from now with a lot of good stuff, than open it as some ghost town. We have to do a good job of populating it." (Before anyone gets too up in arms, that's a hypothetical "two years from now").
Home was meant to be out last year, but
won't be appearing until we get an open beta this Autumn.
On backwards compatibility, Tretton said Sony had to decide how to, "not take a greater hit on production cost, without losing PlayStation's heritage ... Hardware / software for backwards compat wasn't all that expensive ... but we're selling PS2 software to PS2 customers, and selling PS3 software to PS3 consumers."
Tretton's not too chuffed about that, but don't expect a reversal of the policy. "I would like to have had it in there, but Sony's collective strategy determined we could afford to lose it. We've now gone down that road, and we're not going back", he said.
Tretton also made the dubious statement that Sony is "still going to support UMD" as a platform for movies. Feel free to take a punt at that in the forum...
Source: Engadget