As you are aware by now, Sony announced the Playstation 3 Slim at Gamescon 2009 along with the price cut that has been well needed for a long time. And, as many predicted, a lot of people have been pouncing on it, if you take Amazon’s top sellers list to heart.

However, a big question mark was whether or not we would see the return of backwards compatibility to the PS3. Apparently not, as it wasn’t announced at Gamescon at all (not even brought up), but Sony venomously denied it and said that it wasn’t coming back. However, with the recent spread of something involving the first two God Of War games, there is some speculation as to whether or not Sony is bluffing and trying to stop the rumor from spreading like a wildfire like the Slim did. One site said yes, another said no.

However, we got a tip from the same anonymous source (which the reason it is such will be obvious in a moment) that gave PSInsider their tips. The source gave it to him, and then PSI’s owner decided to tell us this to give another site the limelight on N4G or wherever else it ended up. The tip is this: expect BC soon, as the real reason it’s not here yet is because it’s still being play tested.

According to the source (which was brought to our attention just before GamesCon, and note that we’re taking this quote ad verbatim):

“I hope PS2 b/c will be avaible [sic] soon – sadly gamescom they will only announce it, but I think it should be working since it’s more than a year of testing (oddly ppl in France are testing PS2 games on PS3).”

(NOTE: As this was NOT posted on PSI’s site–the owner decided not to come forth with the rumor, letting someone else have the hits–this is the first time ANYWHERE, at least to our knowledge, this info is coming out).

The point of this being that they are still testing this out to make sure everything works right before making anyone aware of this. This could also be the reason why cross-game chat, a highly requested feature, hasn’t been introduced yet. Note that he mentioned that they would only announce it at Gamescon (which it wasn’t announced), but this does not rule out that it isn’t being worked on.

However, this is labeled as a “rumor” for a reason, but seeing as how this source was right on a LOT of his Gamescon claims, we have to think that this guy is pretty damn creditable. Plus, the claim of people in France testing this already, along with the recent patents of technology that would allow such a feature being released to the public and reports that the PS3 can already support the feature seems to bring to mind that they want to make sure there are no hiccups to this like what happened last year with 2.4 bricking PS3’s, or the NXE bricking 360s. Expect for Sony to be denying this for as long as they can, as well (like we said, he’s staying anonymous for a reason, and no, we’re not making it up that we GOT this tip).

Personally, we don’t see why Sony SHOULD be adamant about NOT adding BC back into the PS3. Perhaps it’s to keep PS2 sales going, but with those beginning to fall, there becomes less and less of an excuse NOT to add a feature that would make the PS3 have the biggest library of playable games available on any console. We hope this is true, and we advise you that have been wanting this for some time to keep your fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Just so people don’t think we’re playing with people, here is the N4G PM I got from “fr0sty”, the owner of PSI: