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Sony: PSP Piracy Levels Are “Sickening”
Sony has acknowledged that the PSP is facing a massive challenge with piracy, as illegal game downloads have hit alarming levels.
"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Peter Dille, SCEA’s senior VP of marketing, told Gamasutra.
"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," he added.
According to the platform holder, up to 50 million potentially compromised PSPs are in the market.
"Those numbers are correct," says Dille. "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."
Dille added that, 18 months ago, developers were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform".
That stance has now changed, he noted, with the likes of Dissidia - Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed and Rock Band all due to make appearances on PSP later this year. You can read more about PSP's predicament in our recent feature, Sony's Forgotten Console.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
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I own a ds and a psp, I have an R4 on the DS and custom firmware on my PSP so technically I could easily download and play pirated games on both of them to my heart's content but the truth is I don't really know where to get them! Torrent sites I guess.. But I'm much more interested in homebrew.. There's so much out there that would never get released because nobody would buy it.. That's why most Homebrew is free. The scene I'm into is the chipmusic scene and it's relatively huge http://www.8bitcollective.com/ . that's got to account for at least some of the percentage of "corrupted" psp's and ds's and i'm sure there are other scenes out there that rely on homebrew.
my point:
"corrupted" hardware =/= piracy!
http://pspiso.com/showthread.php?t=83780 .after hacked my psp, all i do is go to that web and download new games. it takes 5min to 1hour to download one game through http , much better than pay 20-50$. I got all the game i want to play sitting there in one website even have more game than FRY or GAMESTOP lolx.
I doubt there are 50 million potentially "compromised" PSP's out there considering LTD sales are actually a little under that and not every PSP is used for pirating (mine is not).
Piracy is a problem and every platform suffers from it - that's not the reason third-parties have abandoned the platform and it finds itself on life support though. You still see many developers releasing on PC and that has a much bigger piracy problem than PSP. There are plenty of law-abiding consumers who will reward good developers and platform holders with their hard earned money. Sony seems to be making a concerted effort this week to blame everyone but themselves for their deteriorating market share and reputation.
Sony would do well to release the next PSP this year and, this time, launch it with the software/interface it needs to be successful (easily accessible download store from the device itself and free media software included). Maybe if Sony would realize that you have to deliver on your promises and not expect paying customers to wait years for features promised since before launch they wouldn't be in the position they are today.
I haven't hacked my psp yet but its incredibly tempting. With so few decent psp games out there, with the majority of psp games being japanese and therefore expensive to import, it is very tempting.
To be honest the only reason I'd do it is to play some of my old plystation games on it.
I'm generally against games piracy but come on Sony there sod all content on the system!
sorry bud lets get some real facts the nintendo has the beggist pircay rate ever then the wii.
yes every platform gets pirated even the ps3!
http://news.softpedia.com/news/1-Billion-Dollars-Worth-Pirated-DS-Games-...
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Almost-1-Billion-Dollars-Lost-by-Nintendo...
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10232
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/27482/PS3-piracy-begins
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122688367525432273.html?mod=googlenews_w...
pc gaming doesn't cost billions in pircay like consoles do. I have yet to about high production costs and rented games too!
Actually, the PS3 still has yet to be hacked--which is amazing and also probably another sign of its relative unpopularity.
check the links I gave in my above posts the ps3 has already been hacked i hear in peru you can get alot of ps3 games too. If you need more links I can add more too.
here is another link on the suject of ps3 hacked
http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-news/1323.html
I agree that piracy is a problem. But I do wish that news outlets wouldn't just repeat figures that companies toss out without challenging them. For example, this article states "up to 50 million potentially compromised PSPs are in the market." As of February 13, 2009 the PSP reached 50 million units sold. So Sony basically stated that every single PSP they've sold has the "potential" to be "compromised". Do they really believe that every single PSP sold has been hacked? That's impossible. Even the most pessimistic picture wouldn't imagine that literally every single last PSP sold in the world has been hacked into. We know that's ridiculous.
Sony also knows that's unrealistic. That's why they use the word "potential". We could say that since the world population is at 6.77 billion this month, that "6.77 billion people have potentially been murdered in 2009." Technically, that wouldn't be false. By the very nature of being alive we have the "potential" to be "murdered" but would we really trot that figure out as a believable statistic?
Piracy is a huge issue, but I don't think we can even begin to tackle it until we start speaking about what it is, and the impact is has, truthfully. We know we can't trust the pirates to tell the truth. Why would they? They're only interest is in justifying their behavior. We need game companies and retail outlets, the ones with the actual data for us to base our estimates off of, to tell the truth.
Good point about writers needing to take a closer look at numbers given to them by any company, and looking for other reputable sources/other figures to give the PR inflated numbers some context.
My PSP isn't hacked and grognard66 above said his isn't either, so I guess that brings the number of potentially hacked PSPs down to 49,999,998 ;)
PSP's hardly dying
It's probably the most popular console in China right now, that or Wii. Piracy is probably a big factor in its popularity though. It's a shame that Capcom can't reap the profits of everyone in China playing Monster Hunter.
I've always been a little on the fence about piracy. I mean, if the people "pirating" things never had any intention of buying the product in the first place, are they really taking money away? I mean, the company was never going to get any money in the first place. Not saying it's still not stealing or getting someone else's work without paying, but who knows, maybe they'll pirate something, like it, and then go out and purchase it, where they wouldn't have otherwise. Obviosuly not every Game/CD/Movie was easily accessible demos/trailers/samples.
Woah I hadn't a clue that they'd sold 50 million PSPs. Honestly thought it was far fewer than that, all I know is it was 22 million around this time 2 years ago.
The fact that the only new games released for several years on the platform were ps2 ports that no one wanted to play killed the format. All those users got sick of waiting for original content and either jumped ship or started to pirate the few mediocre games available, and as he says they cannot get these users back.
Sony need to shoulder some of the blame for the platform dying.
"Sony need to shoulder some of the blame for the platform dying."
I wouldn't call 50 million units sold a dying platform.
The PSP isn't dying, but piracy is a massive issue. The hardware is selling just fine, but games aren't, to the extent that developers were considering dropping it. And I'm not saying that because Sony did; just look at the dropoff in the number of high-profile games that were released in 2008. The PSP's biggest weakness is the fact that it's so trivially easy to pirate on it.