The state of piracy on PSP

The state of piracy on PSP

March 9th, 2008, 21:37 Posted By: wraggster

Over at Neogaf (Which is a forum that the Gaming Industry seem to use as their forums) Rlan posted this rather sad viewpoint on the PSP:

With the recent discussions of piracy for the PC (seen here), I thought it might be interesting to see similar numbers for the other, possibly easiest thing to pirate ever console - the PSP.

The PSP can be turned into a pirating machine purely by installing Custom Firmware - other uses include a Playstation Player to play your own PSOne games on the thing [Which is what I used it for] or use emulators for other consoles like Megadrive, SNES, or even just applications for taking PSP images, DivX playback. etc, or purely homebrew applications of games.

Incidentily, I know a dude who got a job as a games programmer purely by some of the homebrew games he was working on in the PSP!

Anyhow, we know PSPs are selling but the software really isn't. So I went to a Torrent site (Don't think I can mention it anyway) which has a number of people who have downloaded the torrent file from that site directly - so this is just one site.

Let's have a look. I decided to choose some recent big games that were released, some of the bigger games of last year, and some games which were critically acclaimed but sold like shit.

God of War: Chains of Olympus - 94,154
Patapon - 112,183
Ratchet & Clank - Size Matters - 197,113
Crush - 48,959
LOCO ROCO - 163,904
Wipeout Pulse - 116,965
Castlevania X Chronicles - 102,354
Metal Gear Solid - Portable Ops (Not Including Plus) - 231,054
Burnout Dominator - 269,486

This is just one website, not including private trackers that keep to themselves or many other huge download portals, and I'm sure some torrents were taken down from this website anyhow (Looking up either GTA PSP games brought back very small numbers), but even then this is pretty big.

Is there anything Sony can do about this? Maybe cheaper prices? It's really like the Dreamcast all over again, except this time we have internet speeds that can actually download games in a minimum amount of time. Discuss.

Remember that Piracy ruins it for everyone including yourself, game makers are more likely to move to a console where piracy is less of a problem

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