Sony is worried about PSP piracy. Justifiably so since the handheld’s games are among the most heavily pirated of all the platforms. There’s good news though: PSP piracy is experiencing a slowdown. The bad news? Well, the sad fact is there really hasn’t been any noteworthy PSP for several months.
“We’ve made really no secret [that there] certainly has been some piracy on the PSP,” SCEA’s John Koller told MTV Multiplayer. “We’ve seen that as a significant issue — it’s trending down right now, we’ve seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months.”
Despite major blockbusters appearing on nearly every other console, the PSP has been all but completely forgotten this Xmas. That’s got to have a little to do with the downturn in piracy, right?
Perhaps Sony’s tightened security in the PSP 3000 has helped a little too – not that it kept hackers away for long.
So what next for the handheld? Despite fighting an unending battle against the thieves, Sony doesn’t appear to have given up on the console yet, and it’s putting its faith in the PSP community to do the right thing.
“We’ve noticed there’s kind of a ‘good vs. evil’ battle that we track on many of the forums and many of the pirated web sites,” said Koller. “There’s certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP.
It’s kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us,” he added.
There are more games in the pipeline, according to a leak inside Sony. It looks like next year PSP will be getting some of the PS3’s best titles converted for the small screen, including LittleBigPlanet and MotorStorm. But the fact that people will pinch everything that’s not nailed down or red hot sadly means that there’s no way any publisher in their right mind will invest in anything original on the handheld. Thanks, copyright thieves!
Out now | £157 | Sony
