In an exclusive interview with Gamasutra Peter Dille Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment of America discussed how he believed piracy had hurt the software sales of the PlayStation Portable. Dille stated, “I’m
convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille explained how he believed the piracy issue needs to be tackled by the industry as a whole stating, “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.”
In the interview Dille singled out Torrent based piracy as one source of Sony’s problems describing the situation as “sickening”. He went on to point out Resistance: Retribution as an example stating, “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.” When piracy is concerned companies often like to describe every illegally downloaded copy as a lost sale. In the past Jack Tretton of Sony stated “We’ve been able to track that hundreds of thousands of sales, in the case of God of War, are walking out the door on day one.”
In the Gamasutra article it is pointed out that even if Sony wanted to implement a hardware based solution to combat the piracy it was too late due to the 50 million units already on the market. Dille stated, “There’s a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We’re not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container.” Dille described how Sony planned to tackle the issue from multiple angles including legal avenues and customer education.
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Don’t know why anyone buys Sony products. They are one nasty company.
Maybe it’s because when compared to the nintendoDS the PSP has nothing going for it. Why do people think they are entitled to millions when they are making crap. Anyways, gamefly RULES!
clearly jumping on the band wagon for obvious reasons
Too bad for Sony, most people would never of bought the product were it not for the ability to homebrew and pirate games. What he misses is that that ability caused certain groups the buy the system, and certainly they at least bought one game, so they still make profit from these pirates. Also the increase in units among friends causes others to buy the same system so they are not out of the loop. Had it not been for PSP homebrew and piracy, they would of sold far fewer units.
I can see where they draw the parallels, however sadly I must say that at least 60% of the people I know that own PSPs, own them as portable movie players rather than portable gaming.
Aside from that I think they’re trying to blame their failures on downloads at large, but in these ‘tough economic times’ where everyone keeps marking up product and reducing the amount of product per unit, the consumers have to tuck in and bite back at those who are trying to ride the economic curve and turn an indecent profit from it.
I say suck it up and play the pointing game with someone else, it’s like trying to ball up violence and gaming together, they just don’t make sense.
The fact being is that psp was light years ahead of anything on the market when it was initially released. Its versatility and ability to illicit homebrew was definitely a plus for this system. While Sony may feel they lost on the sales of their software, they certainly made a lot of profit on the sales of psp units. Between my kids and myself we own five psps and are currently still very active using our psps.
U2 blamed piracy for decreased album sales. Sony’s blaming piracy for decreased PSP game sales. They should both stop blaming P2P and face the music: their products suck. I wouldn’t bother pirating crap from either company. That’s how bad they suck.
Toothpaste?
Poppycock, I say
“Maybe it’s because when compared to the nintendoDS the PSP has nothing going for it. Why do people think they are entitled to millions when they are making crap.”
PSP, which has a MUCH better graphics: 480×272-pixel resolution, 16.77 million colors>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Nintendo DS: 256×192 pixels with 260,000 colors
Anyway, back on topic. I don’t think Sony, who is VERY GREEDY and has MORE money than they’ll EVER know what to do with, should be the least bit worried about losing sales!
I meant as far as software goes. The games the DS are so much better.
i really feel bad for sony
Damn, Sony should hire me for 6-7 figures, I could solve this problem for them so easily.
1. Release new hardware (PSP 2), that now only new games can play on. Keep the umd drive for full games, and the memory stick slot for the user’s photos, music and video (no access to game content), and add a hard drive that can only be used for game saves and downloadable content. *With this system try to bring HD graphics to the games and movies.
2. Have the new PSP 2 “check in” when it goes online and ban it if it has modified firmware (like the xbox360).
3. Create extra incentive for people to not modify their firmware like game addons, (like gta4:the lost and the damned) and community games that can be downloaded to the hard drive.
4. Actually start creating regular great, original games for the psp that
use its buttons well to generate interest in the system (there are only 6 games I would play, out of how many?)
The moment someone goes online after screwing around with the innards they get an error message, no web surfing, no downloadable content, and no connecting to the ps3. They can still use the umd drive to buy games though.
I am not sure exactly on the production costs of the PSP are, but when they are now selling at 169.99 retail.. I cannot imagine sony making much off of console sales. That said, I own a GP2X, otherwise known as the “Pirate’s Delight” since it has almost 0 legal ground to stand upon, sure there are hundreds (i mean it, hundreds) of homebrew games made with it’s SDK, but it can currently emulate anything prior to the N64, and the newest incarnation the “Wiz” will have the processing power to emulate all that AND the N64 as well as the PS1. Not to plug that particular device, but it’s success is entirely based on what the user can do with it, not what game developers will bitch and cry about. The GP2X does have some legitimate pay-for games, but not many. The Wiz is launching with the intention of having many actual purchasable games. The sale of these devices are based around the devices and not the software. They’re trying to add software support, but the primary selling point is “Hey, you can load all of your GBA, NES, SNES, Sega, Atari, Dos, etc. etc. etc. games on to this bad boy and go for a spin!” not “Hey, pay us $30 for a game that just might suck hard and you cannot return after finding out it really sucked because you might have copied it!”
@Big Idea Bob
If I was working at Sony I would fire your ass. Let me explain why.
1. This is how the PSP currently operates, I.E. the UMD was originally for games and the memory card slot was for data. The only reason people can pirate games is through exploits in the firmware. They even kept releasing new versions of the console that were harder to exploit. By implementing your idea you also gimp the system. You remove the ability to save games to a memory card, as well as lower the possibility of creating games that are based off your content such as Audiosurf (not on psp but it should be).
2. Pirates would just never go online, or would create a mod chip like what was introduced for the xbox that was either stealth, or turned off when you wanted to play online.
3. You just refuted your first point, but anyway. If I’m not mistaken they already do this through the release of new firmware. New firmware gave new features to the device, and locked pirates out of new games until a work around was developed.
4. This is how the industry operates, especially Sony. Since the PS1 they have allowed a ton of crap on their system. This has worked well however because for every 100 bad games there are always at least 1 good game developed. The popularity of the PS1 was due to its huge collection of games.
5. (Your last statement)Pirates are not stupid, they design the exploits so they are not detected. If Sony could detect a modified system they would. If they could detected a modified system that could simply set up a system that flashes the firmware back to its original state. But since pirates are just as smart as Sony’s engineers that’s not likely to stop anyone.
Anyway as I said, your ideas are stupid. In the words of Donal Trump “You’re Fired”.
Maybe if they wouldnt be so cheap in their hiring people to write in their security codes. If it can be made it can be hacked but if your willing to pay the best to code it it takes more work to hack it. They want to be cheap and hire low wage people to write secure codes and then want the laws to protect them instead of paying the best to take care of the job.
And here I figured it was the lack of good games that had been hurting the PSP.
Sony can suck it
Sony is a hardward pirate anyway so who should care whether the games can or cannot play on their proprietary system. The old business model of games dedicated to specific machines is soon to be over. An iPhone equipped with a couple of Zeemote controllers will blow the PSP out of the water. If this doesn’t happen wait until an Android wakes up.