14 DAY TRIAL // The PlayStation Portable hasn't exactly been supported by third-party developers during its lifetime, largely because the piracy on the platform has been extremely high and now even one of the most successful developers on the platform, Ready at Dawn, has condemned the issue.
For those that haven't been interested in the PSP, the platform, despite Sony's best efforts, has been overrun by piracy issues, as hackers always foiled the attempts of the Japanese company to secure the platform, and are still pirating titles left and right.
Ready at Dawn, the studio responsible for one of the most popular games on the PSP, God of War: Chains of Olympus, and another soon-to-be best seller, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, has also come forth and condemned the piracy issues.
According to Ru Weerasuriya, the creative director at Ready at Dawn, the piracy on the PSP has gotten to a point where developing games for the platform doesn't even make any more sense.
"I'm not very familiar with how it is on the DS, but on the PSP [piracy is] pretty rampant now all around the world."
He goes on: "It's getting to the point where it doesn't make sense to make games on it, if the piracy keeps on increasing. It's a tough call right now to say what's going to happen to it and where it's going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games."
According to the Ready at Dawn executive, on handhelds like the PSP or DS, the piracy issue is even bigger than on the PC.
"The PC market has had connectivity and multiplayer, which brings down the piracy, and a lot of the PC games right now, the big ones at least, require you to be logged into a specific network - like Battlenet, when I used to work at Blizzard - that controls it, and has made it easy to curb some of that," he said.
"You can go to Hong Kong and get one cart for the DS with practically every single game that's ever come out for it. It's pretty scary to think that it's got to this extent."
God of War: Chains of Olympus is one of the best selling titles on the PSP, and Ghost of Sparta promises to reach even higher levels of popularity.