14 DAY TRIAL // The leader of Q-Games, Dylan Cuthbert, seems determined not to bring more of his companies videogames to the PlayStation Portable for fear that piracy will lead sales of the titles to be so low as not to justify the effort made.
At the moment, PixelJunk Monsters has been released on the Sony handheld and appears to be heavily pirated. A lot of developers have expressed doubts about releasing games on the PSP because of how easy it was to get the content through nefarious means.
His Twitter feed read “I don't think we'll port anything else to the PSP, we have to see how PJMD does as there's a lot of piracy,” and addressed the issue more since then saying that he was surprised to enter chat rooms for the game to discover that everyone was playing pirated versions of it. When someone suggested offering a demo version to limit piracy Cuthbert, said that “A PSP demo is in the works but I don't think it makes any difference to piracy.”
Sony is well aware of the problems the PlayStation Portable platform has when it comes to piracy and has long sought to find a good way of limiting the problems. The newly released PSP Go gets all its content via download to limit the possibility of a hacker getting in via the UMD drive and also has a non-removable battery that limits the ability to meddle with the firmware of the device.
Unfortunately, the changes intended to limit piracy also lower the appeal of the PSP Go, with most users reporting that battery life is just too low at the moment and the fact that UMD games cannot be ported to the new device, which might make old fans stray away from it.