Sony admits extent of PSP piracy problem

[wraggster]

Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior VP of marketing, Peter Dille, has admitted that the PlayStation Portable has been hit hard by piracy - with as many as 50 million units in the marketplace potentially having been compromised.

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille told Gamasutra. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly.

"It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community. 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."

The admission comes at a point when Sony is finally giving the handheld platform a significant boost, with a string of key titles set to hit the shelves this year, including Assassin's Creed and MotorStorm - but Dille agreed that older hardware could pose an ongoing problem for genuine software sales.

"Those numbers are correct," he said, referring to the 50 million units. "There's a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We're not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container.

"I'm not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest," he continued. "We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music - everyone was doing it. It's almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, 'If everyone's doing it, then it can't be that bad.'

"But, it actually is bad; it's bad for the platform. Again, I'm not saying that that's a magic wand; I think that we have to make sure from a technological perspective that it's not as easy as it is to do that."

Dille also admitted that the company faced mass desertion from third parties over the PSP, with developers "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform".

Sony's UK MD Ray Maguire recently told GamesIndustry.biz that the company had under-supported the platform, but was happy to see a groundswell of support for the handheld building over the course of this year.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...piracy-problem

[Qmark]

Public SDK.
App Store.
Now.

[NeoXCS]

I bet you anything, most (not all of course) of those people wouldn't have bothered to buy the game anyway. FPS + PSP = No. The piracy wouldn't be so bad if they made something worth buying and didn't try to keep our homebrew off the console. Most people I know only download the games they wouldn't have bought in the first place. If they love a franchise or game they buy them right away.

[osgeld]

psp is in a interesting situation

sony and the dev's holler piracy at the drop of a hat

but, and lets be honest for a second, theres not that many titles even worth stealing on the psp

[ICE]

psp is in a interesting situation

sony and the dev's holler piracy at the drop of a hat

but, and lets be honest for a second, theres not that many titles even worth stealing on the psp

This is just me but if I was going to make a game and sink a large budget into it to insure it was of utmost quality the PSP is simply not where im going to put it. Why would I, or anyone else for that matter? People aren't going to buy the game, they're going to steal it.

[Nocuddle]

Potentially 50 Millions of CFW's PSP?
Sum1 at s0ny is tryin to pull a donkey out of my @ss.

They shouldnt have include Memory Stick function at first place, stick with UMD at all time. But thanks to ur mistake, i can enjoy more out of it... for free.

[JLF65]

Someone at Sony has been smoking wacky weed again. 50 MILLION customized PSPs?!? Really?? Does he actually expect people to believe that?!? And they know that because of "illegal downloads". Yeah, pull the other one.

Considering Sony's own figures show that only 50 million PSPs have been SHIPPED to the entire world, Sony now wants people to think the EVERY SINGLE ONE has been hacked. A good trick considering that you can't yet hack the 3000.

More likely, IF the "illegal download" stat is true, it's almost certainly idiots on PCs who think that the existing PSP emulators will play commercial games. The number of CFW PSPs is TINY compared to the base, and growing smaller as 3000s continue to sell.

Sony needs to drop the bull$#@! and tell the truth - they don't care about the PSP enough to put resources into encouraging third parties to make games.

[Dutt]

Someone at Sony has been smoking wacky weed again. 50 MILLION customized PSPs?!? Really?? Does he actually expect people to believe that?!? And they know that because of "illegal downloads". Yeah, pull the other one.

Considering Sony's own figures show that only 50 million PSPs have been SHIPPED to the entire world, Sony now wants people to think the EVERY SINGLE ONE has been hacked. A good trick considering that you can't yet hack the 3000.

More likely, IF the "illegal download" stat is true, it's almost certainly idiots on PCs who think that the existing PSP emulators will play commercial games. The number of CFW PSPs is TINY compared to the base, and growing smaller as 3000s continue to sell.

Sony needs to drop the bull$#@! and tell the truth - they don't care about the PSP enough to put resources into encouraging third parties to make games.

^^ Yeah what he said.. I totally agree man

[ICE]

I dont think they're saying that all 50 million PSP's have been hacked. They said "50 million units in the marketplace potentially having been compromised." . What they're saying is that with that many vulnerable PSP's out there its going to be really hard to stop people from hacking them and pirating games.

They are definitely wording things to sound like they have a good excuse for the PSP's problems though.

[juiceface]

sony is right, take one look at completed downloaded bittorrent numbers on multiple trackers and you will have well over 2 million illegal downloads of resistance retribution, there is no arguing against this fact.