14 DAY TRIAL // Piracy is one of the biggest issues for almost all branches of the industry, be it software, entertainment, or video games. But while it does have a lot of faces and a lot of camps that sustain different sides of it, it is still fundamentally something that affects quite a lot of people and companies.
Sony's PlayStation Portable console is currently one of the most popular handheld devices in the world, having sold over 50 million units since its launch. But even though it is quite popular, developers and publishers keep away from it because of the piracy phenomenon that has affected it for quite some time.
Sony's Peter Dille has now confessed to GamaSutra that the situation was so bad in the last year, that a lot of companies were ready to leave the PSP development altogether and try to bring their new projects to other platforms. Now, with a lot of big titles announced for the handheld, things are looking up, but piracy will still be an issue.
“I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille explains. “It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly. It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem.”
Dille does have a point, as a lot of brand new titles are hitting illegal websites due to piracy, even before they arrive in retail stores. Hopefully, with the Japanese company embracing digital downloads more and more, a lot of gamers will adopt the legal way of getting video titles for their device.