Peter Dille, vice president president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, says the level of piracy on the PSP is “sickening” and that the company is continuing to work on ways to address the problem.
The PSP has been a popular platform for Sony, which announced in February that 50 million of the handheld gaming devices have been sold worldwide, but rampant piracy of PSP games has been an ongoing problem. Dille said Sony is “very concerned” about piracy on the PSP, which he believes has cut significantly into the system’s software sales.
“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community,” Dille told Gamasutra. “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 admitted that the potentially huge number of cracked PSPs on the market has left the platform particularly vulnerable to piracy in the future but said he hoped that a “multi-pronged approached” would help alleviate the problem. “It’s going to require legal; it’s going to require education. I think gamers, if they understood if this meant that a platform would go away, can we convince gamers to pay for their content?” he said.
“I’m not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest. We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music – everyone was doing it,” he continued. “It’s almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, ‘If everyone’s doing it, then it can’t be that bad.’ But, it actually is bad; it’s bad for the platform. Again, I’m not saying that that’s a magic wand; I think that we have to make sure from a technological perspective that it’s not as easy as it is to do that.”
