18 months ago, third-party PSP developers were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform," says Sony's Peter Dille.

As part of an in-depth Gamasutra feature interview, Dille explained how the company's "evangelizing" since then to developers about going beyond the PlayStation 2 port to what kinds of games "make sense" on PSP has helped increase successful software on the platform.

The first fruits of these efforts are just beginning to hit the market in 2009, including Dissidia Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed and Rock Band on PSP, and there are more to come, says Dille.

But as the PSP rebounds, piracy on the platform is still a major concern. "I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille explains. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly."

"It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."

Hardware upgrades to the PSP have been speculated to be aimed in part at closing piracy 'loopholes,' although Sony has never disclosed the extent of the modifications. Even still, the fact that older versions of the hardware are fundamentally on the market complicates the situation -- even if there's a solution, there are 50 million potentially compromised units out there already.

"Those numbers are correct," says Dille. "There's a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We're not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container."

Dille says Sony's aiming for a "multi-pronged approach" factoring in both legal and education -- he believes that consumers could be convinced to pay for content "if they understood [that piracy] meant that a platform would go away."

"I'm not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest," he says. "We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music -- everyone was doing it. It's almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, "If everyone's doing it, then it can't be that bad."

"But, it actually is bad; it's bad for the platform. Again, I'm not saying that that's a magic wand; I think that we have to make sure from a technological perspective that it's not as easy as it is to do that." 

The full interview with Dille on the state of Sony in 2009 is now available at Gamasutra (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23301

It will be interesting to see what Sony has planned for the future of PSP to help combat this terrible problem!

I disagree.... I think piracy has created a huge chunk of PSPs sold.

Without piracy... these PSPs just wouldn't of sold.

It's like the Ipod.  Is piracy hurting Itunes sales....?  Or is it pushing more Ipods.

Studies seem to show it's the latter.

It said "Big chunk of Game Sales"

Sure it sold more PsPs. The extra PsPs sold do not equal Game sales though.

i use hacked PSP and am downloading PSP games to my memory stick. SO WHAT??? Its my PSP i bought it i can do whatever i want with it. I dont wanna pay 40$ for UMDs, its enought to pay 60 bucks for PS3 games.

True.  I doubt piracy has effected sales that much however.  Sony's way of calculating is "Hey look at all those games people downloaded for free... those would of all been bought if it wasn't for piracy!"

When the fact is people are sociologically conditioned to want to pay fair price for a product.

If people don't... by in large its because

A) the price is unfair

B) the don't have the money to buy it.

Or at least that's how current sociological economic theory tells it.

PC and PSP are being torn apart by piracy, because its so easy to do on those platforms. In fact, PSP is the only platform Ive seen people buy for the explicit reason of pirating. On another note, it sucks to see resistance retribution suffer from pirates, its a damn good game.

I agree. People are playing games they would not buy otherwise due to downloads. Yes Sony will blow the potential loss through the roof in the press. The downside to it though is the lack of quality bigger budget 3rd party games, as a publisher would see the potential sales loss as a huge negative.

A) agreed (I can only think of 2 psp games I was happy paying full price for)

B) Think this may be a bit generalized for the psp demographic but plausable

*Puts his CFW PSP Phat down and places hand on keyboard*

They say this NOW?!

Thats like buying a PS3 and saying that you bought the PS3 so you can go out and steal games for it because you paid for the PS3.