Sony admits PSP piracy levels are sickening

The PlayStation Portable

The PSP is set to have a record year in terms of great game releases as a plethora of high-quality, exclusive software hits the portable in the coming months. Such as PSP editions of Assassin’s Creed, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Arctic Rush, and Rock Band: Unplugged. And Sony promises that many more exclusive titles are still unannounced.

However it wasn’t always like this for Sony’s portable wonder. In fact, at one time a small eight months ago, third-party PSP developers were “just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform,” says Sony’s Peter Dille in an interview with Gamasutra.

However even though the PSP is finally getting some top-rate software, there is still a huge problem with software piracy, something that Peter says makes him sick.

To quote from the Gamasutra interview,

“I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille explains. “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.”

But he has hope that Sony can turn the pirating situation around and make lemonade out of lemons.

“I’m not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest,” he says. “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.”

Peter makes a great point as well that people need to realize that if there is enough piracy then it may lead to the end of the PSP. Period. These developers need people to BUY their games in order to stay in business. And Sony needs the sales in order for the system to stay alive. So think about that next time you hear someone talking about pirating games or you consider doing it yourself. The developers work hard to produce what they produce, and they deserve to be rewarded with your monetary support.

Via Gamasutra