Sony Believes Piracy is the PSP's Biggest Problem

By Chris Pereira,

Piracy is a problem for everyone, from the biggest videogame developers and publishers to the smallest. Even the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of five indie games that you can pay any price for -- a single penny included -- was subjected to a rate of piracy thought to be around 25% of the total number of downloads. The PlayStation Portable is no exception, and Sony believes that piracy is actually the system's biggest problem right now.
Rob Dyer, Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior VP of publisher relations, sat down with Gamasutra recently and addressed a number of problems that the PSP is facing, piracy being the biggest of those.

On piracy, Dyer said, "That's been the biggest problem, no question about it. It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now." Gamasutra notes that the last PSP game to reach the NPD's top 10 sales chart was Dissidia: Final Fantasy last August. That's not a particularly good sign, especially considering that since then, Gran Turismo, LittleBigPlanet, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines have all been released.

It's not like this in Japan where, according to Dyer, "it's killing it." He pointed out that many of the forthcoming titles for the system are coming from Japan and that they aren't getting "full-line support" from publishers in North America.

If that's due to piracy, Sony may have something in the works that will at least partially help the situation. Dyer explained, "[W]e also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent."

That's still hardly ideal, but whatever Sony can do to at least slow piracy is a move in the right direction. Dyer said, "We will have a good line-up this year. And hopefully, by virtue of that, we'll carry through to next year as well." As you'd expect, he didn't discuss a potential PSP 2, though rumors continue to circulate that it's in the works and will potentially be announced next month at E3 (though other rumors suggest it won't be announced until Gamescom or the Tokyo Game Show). Whenever it is eventually announced, you can bet that Sony will be prominently featuring its enhanced anti-piracy measures, just as Nintendo is with the 3DS.