Piracy and the PSP

In a lengthy interview with Gamasutra about the state of the Playstation brand in 2009, Sony's senior vice president of marketing, Peter Dille, made some interesting comments about how piracy has affected their popular portable console, the PSP. He said, "we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," a platform that was slow to start anyway due to the lack of early interest from game developers. Dille mentions that while they can fight piracy with hardware upgrades in new versions, that doesn't do anything to help the roughly 50 million PSPs already out there. He goes on to address other aspects of the PlayStation line, including complaints about the pricing and exclusivity.

Comments

Re:Poor excuse

[Hadlock]

I think the days of bleeding edge CPUs are over for consoles. The cell was an interesting design, but a failure in the marketplace outside of fanbois. The Xbox and Gamecube/Wii are examples that you can throw a PPC (or 3, in microsoft's case) plus whatever the cutting edge GPU technology is at the time at the problem and have a functional console. The rapidly shrinking cost of processors ill probably keep the cost at $300 for the next decade or so. Besides, subsidizing the first 100,000 units isn't a big deal when you plan on ultimately selling 20 million of them over the lifespan of the design. I think even sony is making money on consoles now. Nintendo was able to take half a step back from bleeding edge tech and make a profit immediately.