From Westlaw's summary: Plaintiff alleged that defendants sold videogames that "caus[ed] older versions of counsel to
overheat and become permanently inoperable during normal game play." Well, I should definitely stay away from those videogames!
(I should note that the opinion itself uses "console." Also, it found that the complaint didn't plausibly state a claim of deceptiveness merely because the games were branded PS3 and similar terms even if the games made older PS3 consoles overheat; there have been so many PS3s over the years that a reasonable consumer wouldn't think that PS3 branding meant full compatibility; I'm not sure why that would be so, since it's certainly possible to limit one's claims to 'compatible with recent models' or the like.) Garcia v. Sony Computer Entertainment America, LLC, 859 F. Supp. 2d 1056 (N.D. Cal. 2012).
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I suspect that this portion of the opinion was drafted by a judge or clerk not familiar with the console gaming world. Speaking as a consumer, I expect compatibility breaks between generations of consoles (PS2 to PS3 or XBox to XBox 360), but consoles are heavily marketed for and reap large marketplace rewards from full compatibility within a generation. The branding of versions of a console within a generation typically focuses only on non-functional features like color or size, or on clearly modular components like hard drive capacity.
James, that was my strong intuition as well. Though I'm not a gamer, I do have experience with other kinds of rapidly-moving tech, and I would have expected a game labeled PS3-compatible to be compatible with all PS3 machines.
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