Sony Sees PSP Piracy Slowdown, Observes ‘Good’ Beating ‘Evil’

November 25th, 2008, 01:10 Posted By: wraggster

Piracy is a real problem for PSP. It’s not hard for your everyday consumer to simply download games to their handheld.

One of the ways Sony hopes to battle piracy is by offering their first-party PSP games as downloads through the PlayStation Store.

Is that enough?

We’ll have to wait and see, but John Koller, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s head of hardware marketing, told Multiplayer they’ve seen piracy slow down in the last few months.

Why?


Even though hardware sales for PSP continue to do well month-to-month, we almost never see PSP software charting in the NPD Group’s monthly top ten. Given PSP’s multimedia functions, it’s possible they just aren’t using the thing for games — or all the games are being pirated.

“We’ve made really no secret [that there] certainly has been some piracy on the PSP,” said Koller in a phone interview last week. “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. But it has been a problem for us.”

Sony keeps a close eye on PSP-related message boards and the discussions happening at web sites focused on promoting video game piracy.

“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,” laughed 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. And then there’s certainly the other side that believes that they can take as warranted. It’s kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us.”

Is piracy killing PSP software, readers? You don’t have to divulge your own habits here, but what about your friends? Do they pirate PSP games?

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/...-good-vs-evil/

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