Piracy "killed" the PSP or so claims Sony.


Recommended Posts

Speaking of the PSP, there's been a tremendous fall off in North America in terms of support for the system. It's still doing extremely well in Japan.

RD: It's killing it in Japan. [in North America] you have Peace Walker that I think is going to do very good numbers. You're going to have some phenomenal support from Square. They have some great stuff coming. You have some great stuff from Capcom. Again, it's a lot of stuff from Japan...

We have EA Sports stuff that's going to be coming out. You're going to have Toy Story 3 on the PSP that's coming out. There's a number of titles from American publishers that will be there, but are we getting full-line support? No. I'm not going to bull**** you on that.

A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we're very excited about, because they are huge titles. And we also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent.

That's been the biggest problem, no question about it. It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now. And the fact that the category shrunk inside of retail.

We're going to fix retail. First party has done a great job of getting some campaigns in place to do that. We have some very big third-party titles, notably from Japan. We will have a good line-up this year. And hopefully, by virtue of that, we'll carry through to next year as well.

Read the whole five page article here.

:rofl::laugh::rofl:.

Can Sony be any more delusional? Piracy? Killing the PSP?

How about the crappy game selection?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Read the whole five page article here.

:rofl::laugh::rofl:.

Can Sony be any more delusional? Piracy? Killing the PSP?

How about the crappy game selection?

They had good games, like Metal Gear Solid series, Resistance, Soccom, upcoming Kingdom Hearts, and many more, but they can't blame piracy. Piracy probably helped them get more sales of the PSP so people can pirate the games. That's why the PSP Go is not selling well. The DS even has a bigger piracy problem and it's selling more.

Personally I think that Sony can't blame anyone but themselves, due to the fact that they sat on the PSP and expected it to do as well like the PS2 and it didn't happen (same can be said about the PS3). Hopefully they learned their mistakes and can fix their mistakes with the PSP2 when it comes out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, one thing I have noticed is that -

Whenever a console fails, and a company needs a scapegoat for their billion dollar investment in a crappy console .. who do they pick - PIRACY!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeh ok. The 360, wii and the DS/DSi all suffer from the same piracy problems the PSP has. But hey look those are selling so much better and the Sony equivalent.

The day game companies stop spending millions of dollars on DRM, CD protection, and all the other **** that goes into games, will be the day we actually get good games and reasonable prices. They know the game is going to be cracked within a day of its release and they know its going to show up on torrent sites soon after. So why even bother doing it? They only people they are making it harder for is their own customers. I mean look at Ubisoft's new DRM, constant connection? Wtf.

Until then, they're going to keep shooting themselves in the foot and blaming it on piracy.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

lets see there is Piracy on X360. lol sony is funny

I think you're funny. Users have access to mp on a pirated psp and its games without risks of being banned. There are no limitations on a pirated psp. While 360 owners sacrifice xbl/mp component to play a pirated game or gamble being banned by accessing its mp features. And we all know the crack that is xbl to its users. People with a modded 360 most likely have 2 consoles. One being legit and on a paid xbl service, so ms doesnt really lose.

DS doesnt suffer this as much, simply cause you have to purchase additional hardware in order to have access to playing a ripped title. PSP is hacked with ease. nothing required, no soldering, no additional hardware. not to mention DS is targeted at kids. mommy and daddy dont have a problem buying little billy every pokeman game that comes out on his ds. while psp targets a much older crowd.

It's this ease of hackability that shuns devs from making anything for it, leading to less games. piracy is at the root of the psp's problems.

Among many flaws, piracy is absolutely playing the main role in its demise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ok im being funny right. well explain my cousin playing games over xbox live with a modded console. and im talking about playing for months now. also he does have a backup console which is not modded.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I always got the jive that it was UMD, Sony expected it to be the mobile equivalent of DVD's but nobody ended up caring about it.

Sure, you could blame piracy, but why are people pirating games if they're not buying the consoles?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To be fair there is alot of piracy on the PSP as far as I know but to say that it "killed" the PSP to me is just an excuse. I'm sure Sony is still making large off the PSP hardware though, I mean, you can't pirate hardware.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

ok im being funny right. well explain my cousin playing games over xbox live with a modded console. and im talking about playing for months now. also he does have a backup console which is not modded.

maybe someone more familiar with its mod scene can answer this for you. but i can guaranty you there's a risk involved in doing so. Funny you called his second unit a 'backup' though. heheh that's exactly what it is.

I read somewhere last week, someone mentioned that to access live with a modded system you indeed needed a legit one. i dont know, im not much into the modded 360 scene sorry.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To be fair there is alot of piracy on the PSP as far as I know but to say that it "killed" the PSP to me is just an excuse. I'm sure Sony is still making large off the PSP hardware though, I mean, you can't pirate hardware.

Anybody familiar with the video game industry knows it's software licensing and not hardware where the true money is for a system.

And not just for the hardware makers, but retailers as well. I've seen retailers sell systems below cost ($299 vs $305) just to sell the system and get customers.

So ridicule them all you want, but piracy does put a BIG hurt on systems.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anybody familiar with the video game industry knows it's software licensing and not hardware where the true money is for a system.

I know that but they still make money off the hardware, as you said so yourself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Was a pretty sharp device when it first was released.

Over time though I think people either lost interest or bought a DS instead.

To say "piracy killed the PSP" could be true, due to the fact that it really isn't hard to pirate games on the PSP.

Who knows though, it seems publishers are quick to blame piracy these days.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

DS doesnt suffer this as much, simply cause you have to purchase additional hardware in order to have access to playing a ripped title. PSP is hacked with ease. nothing required, no soldering, no additional hardware. not to mention DS is targeted at kids. mommy and daddy dont have a problem buying little billy every pokeman game that comes out on his ds. while psp targets a much older crowd.

It's this ease of hackability that shuns devs from making anything for it, leading to less games. piracy is at the root of the psp's problems.

Among many flaws, piracy is absolutely playing the main role in its demise.

Lol...Why is it that whenever someone mentions psp or ds, they have to resort to calling the ds a kiddies device? Look at the game selection on the DS vs the PSP, and you will see why more people buy ds'. And if you think its piracy that is killing it, think again. It is the poor choice in software. I have a few friends, who bought the psp and hacked it, NOT to pirate psp games, but to emulate snes, scummvm, genesis, gba.

I always got the jive that it was UMD, Sony expected it to be the mobile equivalent of DVD's but nobody ended up caring about it.

Sure, you could blame piracy, but why are people pirating games if they're not buying the consoles?

Yip, just one more proprietary format in a long line of failed formats for sony.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

yeah, nintendo piracy is as simple as buy a cartridge and copy pasta the games, psp one is a hell of alot more difficult...

buy pandora battery, get compatable memory card for magic memory stick - hack the psp load custom firmware...

i know which is probably being hit harder..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Piracy is just a convenient catchall excuse.

Game doesnt do well........PIRACY

Film bombs in the cinema............PIRACY

Music Album doesnt sell as many.............PIRACY

It has nothing to do with the quality of the media you are consuming, oh no it doesnt, damn pirates.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeh ok. The 360, wii and the DS/DSi all suffer from the same piracy problems the PSP has. But hey look those are selling so much better and the Sony equivalent.

The day game companies stop spending millions of dollars on DRM, CD protection, and all the other **** that goes into games, will be the day we actually get good games and reasonable prices. They know the game is going to be cracked within a day of its release and they know its going to show up on torrent sites soon after. So why even bother doing it? They only people they are making it harder for is their own customers. I mean look at Ubisoft's new DRM, constant connection? Wtf.

Until then, they're going to keep shooting themselves in the foot and blaming it on piracy.

Fat chance, you remove the DRM and piracy will sky rocket resulting with the companies going bust from lack of sales. DRM is a must, the issue is deciding where to draw the line. Personally I think what "killed" the PSP was a combination of lack of good games and the UMD format itself, it was a bad choice from day one. That is my 2 cents, take with a grain of salt.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Piracy didn't kill the PSP, a lack of quality games did in my opinion.

Its possible, and very easy to pirate games on every console out today except the PS3. The Xbox 360, Wii, NDS and PSP are all hacked, yet the PSP is the only console not really up to much.

Its far easier to pirate games on the DS too, as some one else has mentioned how hard is it to copy + paste some DS roms on to a Micro SD card, put that in a flash card and play on the DS? Despite that the DS is doing better than ever.

maybe someone more familiar with its mod scene can answer this for you. but i can guaranty you there's a risk involved in doing so.

Usually Microsoft have a major ban wave once a year, when a new hacked DVD firmware is released it usually takes them time to distinguish between legit users and users with flashed firmware. Of course that also depends on how careful the user is, if the user pays a backup that is not a 1:1 copy of the original then can get you flagged for a ban even if you have the latest hacked DVD firmware.

Some people I know would rather buy a new arcade console, flash it, get a year or so worth of play out of it then just buy a new console when it gets banned. Sadly if they pirate 3 games there basically in profit after that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fat chance, you remove the DRM and piracy will sky rocket resulting with the companies going bust from lack of sales. DRM is a must, the issue is deciding where to draw the line. Personally I think what "killed" the PSP was a combination of lack of good games and the UMD format itself, it was a bad choice from day one. That is my 2 cents, take with a grain of salt.

How will piracy skyrocket anymore than it already is? It's not like the DRM is so hard to crack that groups like razor1911 or skidrow spend months on end trying to figure out what to do. Hell take Ubisoft's new DRM. Cracked within 24 hours.

Now look at it from another way. Instead of spending all that money on licensing or R&D on said DRM why not make games better, cheaper or at the very least make the DRM less intrusive. Look at Valve, half-life and its engine was released in 1998 and the last update for it came out 2008. 10 years from the day it was created Valve continued making updates, and distributing them for free. Look at Hl2, infact look at all their games. The prices are very reasonable (you can get Valve's entire catalog for $99), almost every game receives regular free updates and almost all their games are fun to play. Does Steam use DRM? Sure it does, but it excels at keeping it as unintrusive as possible.

I mean they could have gone down the road Activision and EA are going and released a new game every year and we'd be on HL10 by now. But they didn't and nor did they go down the route Ubisoft is now going by making DRM as intrusive as possible.

The other thing to consider in relation to piracy is that it's not always bad. Back in the old days I could get a game demo that was usually of excellent quality and would make me want to buy the game, however these days the demos are either crap or non-existant. Why would I want to buy a game I have never tried? That's where torrents come in. Some people, not saying everyone does this, download a game and give it a shot before deciding wheter or not to buy it.

Piracy doesn't kill games. Lack of ideas, gameplay, new and wow factor does. Eventually people are going to get tired of the same rehash of a game that keeps getting released year after year under a different name, or having to pay $15 for a map-pack, and that's when they will stop buying those games. And what do game companies do after that? Blame piracy.

So yes I agree to an extent that the issue is where to draw the line for DRM, but I don't think piracy will increase drastically if the DRM is removed. Sure there will always be those people who expect everything for free, but at the same time there will be those people who actually buy the products. I mean it's not like people don't know they can just torrent the game for free or that installing / obtaining the crack is difficult, it's just that they choose to support the game creators because they feel the game is worth it.

---

Edit: Another proof that a game without DRM doesn't mean piracy will skyrocket.

I'm sure you remember that humble indie bundle thing where you could pay as much as you want for 5 games. Now neither of those games had any DRM, they were all easily downloadable from numerous sources and about 25% of people who did download the game were pirates (the publishers openly admitted to that) but still they managed to bring in over a million dollars. Doesn't sound too great when you compare it to say Modern Warfare 2, which in the same amount of time managed to earn half a billion. But when you consider that this bundle never had the advertising budget Activision does, hence not many people knew about it, that the games weren't new (I know people who wanted to get the bundle but decided not too since they already had one of the games or something), and that it was pay-as-you-want so a lot of people would have paid like $1 or $0.01; it's a remarkable feat. Here's what they had to say about PC game piracy:

While many game developers blame piracy for their decreasing PC game sales, it is clear that this is not the problem -- relatively few gamers are pirates, and those that are would mostly not be able to afford games anyway.

However, it's easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem: that their games are not fun on PC. The games in question are usually designed for consoles, with the desktop port as an afterthought. This means they are not fun to play with a mouse and keyboard, and don't work well on PC hardware. Their field of view is designed to be viewed from a distant couch instead of a nearby monitor, and their gameplay is simplified to compensate for this tunnel vision.

Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers in the world, and it develops exclusively for desktop computers. Why do they succeed where everyone else fails? They create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard, and with all kinds of desktop hardware. If developers spent more time improving their PC gaming experience, and less time complaining about piracy, we might see more successful PC games.

With the Humble Indie Bundle promotion we've seen that when we treat gamers as real people instead of criminals, they seem to respond in kind. Anyone can get all five DRM-free games for a single penny, and pirate them as much as they want -- we have no way to find out or stop it. However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server? We'll never know for sure, but somehow I doubt it.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

...

Now look at it from another way. Instead of spending all that money on licensing or R&D on said DRM why not make games better, cheaper or at the very least make the DRM less intrusive. Look at Valve, half-life and its engine was released in 1998 and the last update for it came out 2008. 10 years from the day it was created Valve continued making updates, and distributing them for free. Look at Hl2, infact look at all their games. The prices are very reasonable (you can get Valve's entire catalog for $99), almost every game receives regular free updates and almost all their games are fun to play. Does Steam use DRM? Sure it does, but it excels at keeping it as unintrusive as possible.

...

Yeah, Steam is a form of DRM, but the benefits I get from it far outweigh the actual DRM downsides (I can't log into my account from multiple locations, that's it). And Valve keep supporting the games for so long that there's no worry about it no longer being supported in a few years time (want to play Halo 2 MP on the xbox?)

Hell, there's an update coming out today for HL2 bringing support for the Mac platform (Also, buy the game once and get it on multiple platforms for free) and updating the engine to a brand new build, and this is a game from 2004.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would say piracy on the PSP is about on par with the DS

I honestly do not think so. Not when you guy buy actual user percentage. DS user base is much larger than the PSP.

Most DS's are owned by little kids who do not know anything, and neither do their parents, so Piracy is not even an option. The PSP however, I do believe it was owned by an "older crowd" and they were a bit more tech savvy so there are I think way more pirates on the PSP.

Literally everyone I know with a PSP, which is not much, but the few I know, and even when I mentioned it in my local Gamestop, everyone talked about having it modded to some degree. Every single person. I can think of relatives who have kids who have the DS, and I know for sure they are not modded.

Let's also keep in mind the DS has outsold the PSP by like 10:1 or some outrageous number. So yeah, if the same % of owners were pirating on the DS that are pirating on the PSP, I think it would be Nintendo saying the same exact thing.

I cannot see how anyone in their right mind could not think piracy does not have a dramatic affect on something like the PSP when it without a doubt does. Sure, great games do not help either, but honestly the PSP library is not as awful as people make it out to be IMO, just when browsing the PSN story and running across PSP games, there are definitely some more than decent games I would say.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I honestly do not think so. Not when you guy buy actual user percentage. DS user base is much larger than the PSP.

Most DS's are owned by little kids who do not know anything, and neither do their parents, so Piracy is not even an option. The PSP however, I do believe it was owned by an "older crowd" and they were a bit more tech savvy so there are I think way more pirates on the PSP.

I'm not 100% sure on that one.... I see little kids everyday with flashcarts in their DS (parents get sick of buying new games every week and flashcarts are literally everywhere....just look on craigslist)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Piracy on the DS is definitely rampant and was a huge problem for Nintendo. So much so they even took one of the manufactures of the flash carts to court and they are now prohibited from selling them.

Of course in the after math about 10 new devices replaced it.

That is why with each version of the DS, Nintendo have tried to block these devices from working. When they realised they couldn't do that, they started changing the software. For example, Pokemon Heart Gold / Soul Silver, Zelda Spirit Tracks, WarioWare DIY etc all have anti-piracy software and it required sometimes weeks to break it.

Coupled with how easy it is to use and buy the devices, there's no doubt the DS has more pirates.

The PSP relied heavily on the firmware version installed and in some cases, once you updated you're **** outta luck and can't mod. Same goes for the iPhone (and if figures is what you care about, only 10% of iPhones are estimated to be jailbroken), and the sales figures for that are very quickly gaining on the PSP, and will no doubt over take it later this year.

Edit: here's an article as far back as 2007 detailing Nintendo's actions

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/nintendo-has-an-eye-on-r4

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, one thing I have noticed is that -

Whenever a console fails, and a company needs a scapegoat for their billion dollar investment in a crappy console .. who do they pick - PIRACY!

Yarrr :( We always be gettin' tha blame fer everythin'. Their logic be flawed, ye see... we be stealin' rum constantly, but arrrr the distilleries outta business? I didna think so. If ye make a quality product, ye'll be fine, savvy? Maybe that's yer problem, Sony. Ahoy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.