I think the PSP piracy situation is now out of control.  So it'll be interesting to see how Sony's efforts to revive software sales for the PSP in the West will fare this year and next.  So what do you guys think about the whole thing?  Do you feel that Sony can turn things around and have PSP games consistently in the top 10 in the West?  Do you think third-parties will meet with success on the platform?  Should Sony have instead tried something different?

How out of control is it? I heard it was under 8% the other day.

Does anybody have any actual statistics on this?

Here is one of Sony's big problems. My household alone, bought over 100 PSP games between the PSP launch and God of War Chanis of Olympus. Since then we have bought less than five. Why? UMD's are a pain in the ass, and PS3/360/Wii/iPhone have taken over thanks to it. Once PSP games are all available on PSN. They will see a huge influx of purchases from one very usefull household.

Noone buys software, its because a large % of people either pirate or use it for its other functionality. I don't really see how they can change that... The 2.31 Tie ratio is appalling! The DS even by comparison has a much, much healthier 4.0 tie ratio which makes PSP exclusive software makers cry by both sheer number of sales for the DS.

Can they turn it around? I hope so since it's my portable platform of choice.

More good games will help, more good games available via PSN rather than getting UMD will help further.

Personally I'd prefer them to drop UMD totally, stick a decent storage space in the PSP instead and deliver games either on cards or via PSN.

To be honest, I don't think they can.

That news about piracy with Phantasy Star Portable is an April Fools.

After seeing Resistance: Retribution bomb I'm going to say...probably not.

Considering flood of PSP annoucments recently I'd say they have good chance to improve those bad tie ratios.

And the more unhackable PSP 3000 they sell the better it will get.

The problem is UMD, the format is not good for portable, i mean, i was annoyed by the noise, the loading times but mostly, by THE BATTERY LIFE, so i installed a homebrew only to dump my UMDs in the Memory Stick, since then i play nicely on my PSP...

Now, i use homebrew only to smooth portable play, but what about the people that are annoyed by the UMDs and don't want to use homebrew? they'll pass... And what about the people that get the homebrew, and discover that with that the PSP is really easy to pirate? they count for hardware sales, but not for software sales...

So my point is this: UMD makes a lot of people to either not get a PSP or use it to pirate, and both are bad for software sales...

If they can distribute the games in both UMD and online until the PSP2 comes (i hope the PSP2 will get rid of the UMD once and for all), i think that can help to distribute more software without piracy...