One of the reasons for the PlayStation Portable not doing as well as it could against the Nintendo DS was the fact that piracy drove away some of the developers from creating videogames for the platform.
Sony seems to be catching up with the PSP Go! and one of the steps that it has taken to reduce piracy has been to make the battery of the new device irremovable by any normal means. This basically means that the handheld will not be hackable but also that those who use it will need to ship it to Sony for the battery to be replaced once it starts to die out.
John Koller, who has worked at Sony on the
PSP Go!, said that “We've had a lot of success with the 3000. While the earlier models of the PSP were incredibly easy to use with ripped or downloaded games, the PSP Go is going to make things tougher on the pirates. You won't be able to rip your games and play them on the system, the firmware precludes that. There's no external battery, so there's a number of protections put into place on the system.”
The
PlayStation Portable Go! is set to be launched on October 1 and is quite a significant departure for Sony. The new device does not have the UMD drive, which means that all the applications and all the videogames, which a user might need to download from a new special section of the PlayStation Network.
The fact that titles have to be downloaded and cannot be exported from the device also serves as a deterrent to piracy. Intrepid and mischief bound users will probably find a way to hack into the PSP Go! at some point but if the overall public cannot easily grasp the process needed, Sony will likely consider the new handheld a success and will attract new developers to it.
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