14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest problems for the PlayStation Portable handheld from Sony has been piracy, which has driven quite a few developers and publishers away from the platform, and the company says it has learned from its mistakes and has made the new Vita platform better protected against pirates in the long term.
Sony says that since the design stages anti-piracy measures have been one of the core features of the Vita and that they will serve it well in the long term.
Speaking to Gamasutra as part of a bigger interview, Scott Rohde, who is a senior vice president at the Sony Worldwide Studios, has said, “That was front and center in the early specs of this machine. We needed to have something that would combat piracy from day one, and that's why the cards that you can purchase for the games are in their own proprietary format.”
He added, “It's something that we felt was completely necessary to make sure that people could not pirate these games. I mean, it's a custom security solution on each one of these cartridges. That is something that we are confident will protect us from piracy for the long term.”
The older PSP used standard memory slots, which made it very easy for pirates to plug in counterfeit games and also made it easier for them to access the memory of the device in order to hack the official firmware.
The PlayStation Vita is better protected because of proprietary formats and the protections that Sony has been adding to its firmware, both on home consoles and handhelds, after the PS3 has been hacked in 2011.
Pirates will probably be able to break the protections of the Vita at some point and Sony will then rely on constant firmware updates in order to keep the device one step ahead of counterfeit content.