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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.
First, it's the frigging number of games it has - barely any. Take a look at the shelf space the PSP has, and it's very little compared to its competiror, the DS. Heck, I've seen more shelf space dedicated to PSP hardware and PSP accessories, than PSP games.
Secondly, the lack of releases - you can almost count the number of games the PSP will have coming out in the year ahead on fingers and toes. New release lists on the PSP are remarkably skimpy. Heck, I'm sure there are more games for the PSP released every month for the first few years than a year nowadays. Retail space for the PSP has been shrinking - even the PS2 gets more shelf space!
Third, the pirates offered a better product. Games load quickly off memory stick, and save battery life as well. And heck, you can dump your games yourself easily nowadays (insert UMD into PSP, enable USB on the UMD drive, and a little .iso file is ready for you to copy off - you don't see the contents of the disk, just the ISO file).
The competition, the Nintendo DS, is far easier to pirate for (a memory cart is direct-mapped for 128MB, without bankswitching... thus most games are under 128MB in size, while PSP games can be 1.8GB or so). But it has a lot of games, tons more released practically daily, and many that sell for years. Enough so that practically everyone can find a set of games they'll like.
Sony basically abandoned the PSP once they released the PS3. They could've released firmware updates that let you dump UMD disks to a memory stick (locked to that console with DRM blah blah blah and requiring the original UMD, a la the Xbox360), but no, we get crap feature updates. About the biggest thing in the firmware update was... Skype.
I have a 16GB Pro Duo in it. I have a bunch of PS1 and PSP games on that memory stick, I'm using compression but there's plenty of room left.
I own every PSP and PS1 game on there. Seriously, I have the disk or UMD for every game on there. Why did I hack my PSP? Because I don't want to carry the fucking UMD's around! I tried that at first, UMD's don't take abuse nearly as well as Game Boy Cartridges did. My Street Fighter Alpha 3 UMD has the clear window separated from the rest of the UMD casing. (that particular game has its own smaller Pro Duo - it gets confused by large ones) I can snap it back out and use it, I'm considering a drop of super glue but the memory stick is sort of nullifying my desire to do that.
I guess you can call me "an honest pirate" since I'm not actually pirating anything, but I use all the pirate utils.
My take on Sony - I was criticizing them for ignoring their customers. PSP 1000 people hacked it to do things Sony never intended, so they came out with a 2000 that was (initially) harder to hack. People hacked it, so they came out with a 3000 that's incredibly difficult to hack. The customer spoke up and said "I want my PSP to do these things" and Sony, instead of making it happen, said no.
If the PSP 4000 rumors are correct, it shows Sony is beginning to listen. The 4000 supposedly doesn't have a UMD drive and will be pure on board storage.
That's a step in the right direction, but don't kill physical media just yet.
I like physical media. I have 10GB worth of music on my iPhone - I ripped all 10GB off of CD's that are in display racks in my living room. All of my PSP and PS1 games on my PSP have disk either in my office closet or in a CD binder near my entry (Hurricane Ike killed the original cases/manuals)
Please don't go pure online distribution only. I don't trust it. We've already seen a couple of DRM laden distribution companies go belly up. We don't need you "Pulling a Sony" when you're tired of us.
To be fair, I bought pirate hardware for my Game Boy Advanced - cheap Chinese crap was broke when it arrived so I never actually got to use it. My reasons were the same - not to pirate, but to not carry the carts around. A coworker is doing this with his DS, I think I'm going to do this with my DS also.
I feel more comfortable knowing if my whole backpack gets stolen I lose my PSP and my DS, but when it comes down to it, I only have to replace the systems (and the memory cards) not the systems and every damn game I had for them.
Between two major theft incidents (both inside of locked personal area's) and hurricane Ike I've lost lots of media. I know how much it sucks to replace it all. The less at risk I put my media the happier I am. I like the idea of digital distribution since there's no media or hardware to risk, I just don't trust the providers to offer it to me for the rest of my life any time I want it.
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As a gamer, I've had my eye on a PSP for a while now, mainly for the piracy/hack factor. Its a nice little system that would be great for emulation and PSP games. But what is killing this system, other than the DS, is the Game Starvation. All one needs to do is compare the review lists at IGN (or your favorite game site). Games come out weekly for the DS, in bulk. Games come out in spurts for the PSP, a few here and there, sometimes months apart.
Plus when you go to the store, the PSP section always looks like a clearance section. Few games, broken/off displays, lots of empty spaces signifying "better days," and the same few crap games they had last time you stopped in.
Games sell systems. And "50 million" PSP gamers should be large enough to sell new, quality content to. Lack of games and a great system to do emulation on equals high piracy numbers. And lack of software sales is DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTABLE to available content. Just put together a Virtual Console like Nintendo with legal emulation and see how your software sales do.
Sony, want to turn your PSP software sales around? Then 1) sell the damn thing to developers! Your claimed user base should be more than enough to attract some good shops with interesting ideas and IP. 2) Hire new merchandise reps. Your store displays suck. 3) Keep publishing older games and keep them in stock. To sell more games they have to be available. 4) Stop trying to make every game a port or offshoot of a PS2/PS3 game.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Kudos for the "Clue" reference.
I was considering buying a PSP actually. The piracy aspect entered into the equation. Then I looked at the games available and realised it wasn't worth it.
Yes, Sony, I wouldn't even PIRATE your games.
About the only game I'd like is Football Manager. I like the idea of a portable version of that. But it's not worth shelling out $200 on a console for just for one title. And I literally found no other game across the entire race that I was interested in.
Everything the parent said is 100% true. It's a slick piece of hardware, but after nearly 8 months of not using it, I finally just sold mine to a friend for his kids to use.
I used my PSP while riding the train to & from work every day, about 35 minutes in each direction. As a result, I wound up playing Lumines more than anything else because every other game I tried was a complete joke, or, in the case of GTA, too convoluted & involved for easy pick-up & put-down gameplay. If I can't turn the game off at my stop without losing all of my progress, then it's not worth playing.
And yeah, UMD movies, why on earth would I want them!? So I can rewatch half of my DVD collection in "teeny weeny eyestrain-o-vision"? (Thanks, Yahtzee.) Fuck that.