Sony: PSP Piracy 'Sickening,' Has Reduced Sales

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In a new interview with Gamaustra, Sony's Peter Dille called the problem of rampant PSP piracy "sickening," and said that Sony now believes a large amount of software sales are lost to illegal sharing.

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," said Dille.

Stating that third-party developers were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform" around 18 months ago, Dille explained that Sony has been "evangelizing" the platform since, in an attempt to pull in more original PSP projects outside of PlayStation 2 ports.

But with millions of piracy-capable PSPs still on the market, Dille admits that the "toothpaste is out of the tube."

"[Piracy is] not good for us, but it's not good for the development community," he said. "We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    April 22, 2009 1:04 PM

    This sounds like a shitty excuse, since this is the case on the DS as well.

    Hell, the DS doesn't even have the advantage of firmware updates and newer models that prevent piracy.

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      April 22, 2009 1:05 PM

      [deleted]

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      April 22, 2009 1:07 PM

      People still pirate the DS. The only difference is there's a lot of people out there who dont know how to pirate the DS.

      That and the DS has a lot higher penetration rate.

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        April 22, 2009 1:21 PM

        And the DS doesn't use a horrible format that eats batteries and is just all round bad.

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          April 22, 2009 1:35 PM

          I really hope nintendo sticks with cartridges for upcoming DS 2.0 type machines. There is no excuse to go to disc media for a portable.

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            April 22, 2009 2:16 PM

            hopefully they go with digital distribution (like the dsi) , Id love a ds with like 32 gb storage on board and the ability to buy a game and install it right from my ds (ala iphone)

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            April 22, 2009 2:35 PM

            I hope nintendo just uses a high capacity SD card, and you buy everything online to your card, and that's it... if they need to put "steam" like DRM on each file, fine. (you can still make your own backups, that only work on your DS). If you want to move your account to a new DS, just invalidate your account for your old DS (deleting the certificate so you can't decrypt the games encrypted for that DS, for that account), and have them generate a new certificate for your new DS. You'd need to re-download your games, but that'd be the worst of it.

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          April 22, 2009 4:59 PM

          Wah?
          The battery life on the DS FAR exceeds that of the PSP!
          And as for "horrible format"...well, whateva, seems to work for the 100's of excellent games I have played on it...

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      April 22, 2009 2:50 PM

      True regarding the DS being pirated too. To run homebrew I think the DS is much easier to get set up, since the PSP has a decent chance of bricking when switching about firmwares like crazy.

      The only thing I would even argue about with the pirating is that not all people simply play the game and not buy it. There's quite a good number of people out there that purchase the game later because they liked trying it out first.

      Aside from that, PSP just needs better games.

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