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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.
Piracy is rampant on the DS too, and there's tons of money being made there.
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What probably happened is they picked a number for how much money they wanted to make and when they didn't make it blamed it on piracy.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The fact that pirated PSP games run faster and use less battery probably didn't help either. (since they run from flash memory rather than the clumsy UMD discs)
Not if a large enough percentage of your user base pirates already. There simply won't be enough people that -do- buy.
If anything, the growing attitude of "don't buy it, get this firwmare patch and download it here instead!" will hasten the death of systems like the PSP. It'll take a while, but eventually even good games will fail.
I do it to the kids. :)
Maybe someone should clue Sony in to the fact that all the games they have "released" for the PSP fell into one of three categories:
#1 - Crappy "rpg" games that can't be played for anything less than a 2-hour stretch (Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Monster Hunter, Wild Arms XF aka Wild Arms Tactics, etc).
#2 - Re-releases of games people already owned a copy of for original Playstation.
#3 - UTTER CRAP (lookin' at you, Lumines, you cheapass soulless Columns-alike).
If there'd been some truly impressive, unique, and compelling games for the PSP, it would have driven sales. If they'd made the thing to function correctly, it would have driven sales.
Instead, compare PSP vs DS to Sega Nomad vs Game Boy. What do we have in each generation? Nintendo's had a lesser screen, less processing power, less cute/pretty visuals, but more battery life and kick-ass, fun to play games. Thus, Nintendo won.
Piracy, like communism, is just a red herring Sony is using to try to distract people from the fact that they're a bunch of half-wits who would no longer know a good game if someone shoved it up their whiny asses.
Jurassic Park was not rendered in *real time*. It could have been rendered on a 286 running at 8mhz if you were to wait long enough...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The real reason is that the game industry is over produced, and past games compete with new products. How many games are released each year? Who can keep up with them all? We can't buy every game that is released. Then there's the fact that most of them aren't worth the $60 pricetag let alone the fact you can rent them for a fraction of the price or buy them used and get the same enjoyment out of them.
Truth be told the game market is suffering from over production.
I bought my PSP in order to have something to do on my daily commute, I thought I'd play games on it, I played through God Of War, and a few others, and started to realise that nothing came close to GoW in terms of fun, so it languished as a portable mp3 and aac player for a while
I ended up sticking hacked firwmare on it just to see what all the fuss was about, and now I can use it to play just about any music and low enough spec video, as an ebook reader and a GPS unit, hasen't seen a game for probably 6 months.
If Sony had this sort of stuff built in, it'd probably sell a bit better.
Its funny how pirates always claim all the games they have cracked are not worth buying.
Its easy to assign something as worthless when you took it for free isn't it?
Nobody is making psp games because people with an overblown sense of self-entitlement are pirating them as a matter of routine.
Why would any sane dev just make a game that nobody would buy? do you work for free too?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
WoW didn't become #1 out of sheer inertia (how?), it became #1 by doing MMORPGing better and in a way that the average joe could appreciate. That's why it didn't simply convert the EQ and UO players or whatever was on the MMO market before WoW, it converted non-MMO players (which may not actually have been playing any games before) into MMO players.
Same for the Game Boy and DS, they became #1 by doing portable gaming better than the competition and by increasing the appeal of gaming (Game Boy: Tetris, DS: Nintendogs, Brain Age), bringing new non-gamers into the portable gaming market instead of attempting to convert home console users into portable gamers. The PSP didn't do that, it tried to expand Sony's home console monopoly (a monopoly is not completely unopposed, just without effective opposition) into the portable realm by offering the same things as the home console (a big advertised game was the GT4 PS2-PSP connectivity), forgetting that the home console market already has a better gaming system at home and its games were designed for playing at home, leaving the PSP with few unique selling points. From what I hear from Americans over there portable gaming isn't very big anyway because public transportation is pretty bad and you can't play a game on the commute when you're steering a car. The DS, even when played at home, still offers a unique experience with unique games that the hiome consoles don't even approach.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.