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Piracy May Force Q-Games To Abandon PSP Plans
Developer Q-Games has said that it doesn’t expect to port any more PixelJunk titles to Sony’s PSP due to the handheld’s piracy rates.
While studio president Dylan Cuthbert didn’t cite piracy estimates or sales figures for PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe (PJMD), he said that the firm's experience with PSP piracy could deter the company from further development on Sony’s portable.
“I don't think we'll port anything else to the PSP, we have to see how PJMD does as there's a lot of piracy,” he tweeted.
“It was a shock to login to a PJMD chat room and hear them talking about how they were all playing ripped versions,” he added.
Responding to a consumer who asked whether the company could combat piracy by building serial numbers into its games, Cuthbert said: "Unfortunately the pirates could just hack those kinds of things out.”
He also noted that a demo for the title is in the works, “but I don't think it makes any difference to piracy", he said.
In April, SCEA’s senior VP of marketing, Peter Dille, labelled PSP piracy levels “sickening”, suggesting that piracy had taken out “a big chunk” of the handheld’s software sales. Dille said that PSP piracy had made it more difficult to convince third party developers to support the platform. One such developer was Ubisoft, which only recently announced plans to fully back the PSP again following the emergence of "new ways to control piracy" on the platform.
SCEA’s director of hardware marketing, John Koller, said in August that the PSPgo’s lack of an external battery would combat PSP firmware modding previously enabled by the Pandora battery. "You won't be able to rip your games and play them on the system, the firmware precludes that," he said. "There's no external [PSP Go] battery, so there's a number of protections put into place on the system."
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
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@AaronMC I get your general point. I think its true that to assume everyone who accumulated a pirated copy would have bought it at retail is over simplistic. But at the same time it seems that for you to say that there’s “a net gain” is making the same assumption but in the other direction. The games that are most pirated are likely to also be the most popular, so they will likely have high sales as well as high piracy levels. The truth is there is no way of telling how many sales have been ‘lost’ as a result of piracy.
When you look at a game like Spores, where it was downloaded half a million times on bit torrent you’d have a hard job convincing EA that that is was good thing, for that reason is harms publishers confidence in a platform and therefore negatively effects the platform as a whole.
Your point about publisher confidence is a good one, but if it harms the platform and the publisher simply because they think games will sell poorly, well, that's their own fault. The market is changing whether they like it or not, so they better find ways to adapt.
But my "net gain" argument is actually somewhat supported by data, that's why I'm better off making that assumption. But even better off, I don't make that assumption fully. I said that there is either no effect or a positive one.
The publisher argument is that of the three possible outcomes, the negative one is true. I'm arguing that no data bears that out and it is one of the other two. It doesn't matter which one of the other two is true, since both negate the publisher's argument.
What data exactly supports an increase in sales? As far as I know, there is no way of knowing whether piracy results in less, more, or the same amount of sales.
I know I point out in every post about piracy that the hypothesis that piracy causes weak sales is simply wrong. None of the data bear that out. There isn't even a correlation between the two, much less a causal link.
If anything, there is a correlation between the best-selling games being pirated the most. You could interpret that and say that those same games would have simply sold better if not for the piracy, but there is data to refute that statement, as well.
To be fair, thats not exactly what he said, simply that piracy had taken a big chunk out of sales.
To be honest though, I'd say piracy is much more rampant on the DS than the PSP. Every day pretty much I get asked about R4's. And this is from parents and kids. The only people who ever seemed to talk about the PSP piracy were mid 20's guys.
Piracy undoubtedly causes some lost sales. How many that constitutes is an completely different debate.
Well, yes, piracy does cause lost sales. But that only works in discreet units of sale. This guy pirated a game, so he won't buy. But when a developer refers to lost sales, he's talking about the only number he knows, the final sales figures.
And it is on that number that the data indicate that piracy has either no effect or a positive one. Yes, it might stop a few guys from buying, but it may cause more people that would not have originally bought, to buy. This means that the one lost sale is counterbalanced by more gained sales.
Thus, there is a net gain. This hypothetical net gain is what the data indicates is true.