http://www.gamestooge.com/2009/04/23/editorial-dont-blame-piracy-on-psp-woes/
Not too long ago I wrote an article bemoaning the fate of new software releases on the PlayStation Portable platform: 13 new titles so far this year, less than 100 last year, things just look really bad and for no apparent reason. The hardware sells well, over 50 million units so far.
Enter GamaSutra and their interview with Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment. On the very last page of the interview, he sheds some light on what is happening with the PSP.
“To talk about the software picture, I want to go in the wayback machine for a minute, 18 months or so. Prior to the PSP-2000 getting introduced and the resultant surge in sales from a hardware perspective, it’s safe to say that most third-parties were just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform.”
So, as recently as a year and a half ago, third parties were ready to abandon the PSP all together. I guess we should be lucky that almost 100 titles were released last year. Dille claims that there are a large number of games in the pipeline, the problem is that they haven’t actually announced them:
“Because we usually can’t announce our third-party publishers’ titles for them, but we wanted to make sure in February that they weren’t saving these announcements for E3 because the retailers needed to understand what was coming and the fruits of our labor. Another long answer, but it was a complicated problem because of the development timeframes.”
It’s hard to get excited about a list of games that haven’t yet been publicly announced. For those of us old enough to remember, it smacks of Richard Nixon’s non-existent “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam: “No, no, really, we have a plan. No, I can’t tell you what it is!”
But none of this will matter if the games don’t end up being purchased. Games don’t get bought, retailers don’t order them, cycle repeats. I ran into this problem just today trying to run down a copy of Samurai Shodown Anthology on the PSP. It’s a minor title, so most stores didn’t even bother ordering it expecting sales to be negligible. Out of 6 stores, I found one copy of it for the Wii and 0 PSP copies. The PSP version isn’t even listed on either the EB Games or the GameStop websites.
Naturally Dille points the finger at piracy:
“I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP. 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 also 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.”
What he fails to explain is how piracy is just as big a problem on the Nintendo DS via the R4 device, and yet it doesn’t seem to have impacted software sales to the degree that it has on the PSP.
