I know 4 people with psp's. Between them, they've bought exactly 0 games. They've hacked them all and d/l the games from the interwebs.

@Lord N

I just learned something tonight, thanks I never knew the basics of modding a system.

I knew someone once with a PSP and he had an emulator on it and was playing Nintendo games too. But it makes sense in a way. It's free and you can have access to a library of hundreds of games that take up little memory. After I saw this I wanted a PSP but then I remembered I never play portable gaming. The one place I would consider playing portable gaming is on the porch of a house on a rainy day.

I think most PSP's come with 3.52 installed and that has not been hacked yet to allow games on the mem stick to be played, but i could be wrong.

I've only bought 4 games for mine, and I don't pirate *shrug.* I just don't find much that interests me on it. My favorite games are RPGs and Platformers, and the PSP is lacking in both. For comparison I'm approaching 30 DS games and will probably pass 40 this year.

Edit: I should point out that although I refuse to pirate any current games because it hurts the industry, I do run lots of old roms on my PSP of games I already own (PSone, SNES, GBA, and NES games).   So although I don't buy much for my PSP, I do enjoy it as a way of playing all my old games in one portable.  Before you say this hurts the industry still because of VC sales, I have bought 10 VC games, so I think I'm supporting that pretty well too.

I only own 1 game for mine and that is Hotshots Golf.
For the first week I owned my PSP I would play SNES, NES and Genesis games on it. But I don't even do that any more.

I just haven't seen any games for the PSP that was worth buying. =/

 The PS1 was before the P2P days and CD burners were still something of a luxury. For the other systems, you had to order something.

 Having to order something seems to be a psychological barrier to a lot of people. You can tell someone that if they order something they can get free games and they won't bother with it. But if you drop everything they need in their lap they'll go nuts pirating games. 

I have a PSP and I am now up to a whopping total of six games. I have owned more than that but most were not worth keeping and I traded them in towards new games.

Having to order an extra part is not a barrier to anyone who's into doing this kind of thing.

Playing burned games is VERY common on the PS2 and Xbox whether it be via using a swap magic disc, HD Loader, a modchip, or some other method. Hell, the mod/hacking community for those two platforms is/was bigger than that of the PSP, so it wasn't very hard to find a suitable method. A book was even released called "Hacking the Xbox," and nearly everyone knows about the "tape & tissue trick" and Swap Magic discs. Despite this, both platforms had good software sales.

Burned games and P2P are just a convenient scapegoat. There are plenty of other, far more plausible reasons for the PSP's low software sales(several of which have already been brought up in this thread), but people just ignore them.