Piracy and the PSP 272
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.
Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades... (Score:5, Informative)
That's what Profanity Blacklist [slashdot.org] is for.
Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Emulation (Score:4, Informative)
Too true.
"Piracy" may screw with game sales, but will still have a number of the units sold (you can't play the game if you don't have the console).
PSP, on the other hand, sells like shit because there are no good games for it, UMD's suck battery life like no tomorrow (if I load a game image to the memstick I get 25% or more battery life ), and the very idea of buying a UMD movie instead of just encoding the DVD down for my memstick is fucking stupid.
I've had multiple friends ask me whether they should buy a DS or a PSP in the last year. Without hesitation, I pointed them to the DS. My PSP hasn't even been charged in the last six months, for chrissake.
Re:Emulation (Score:3, Informative)
Monster Hunter is a bad example. You get max 50 minutes to finish any quest -- if you don't finish it by then, you fail it. some quests are shorter, and the "training school" quests are just a few minutes.
The main failing as I see it is the lack of interesting games.
Most of the games are just jap-ports, and while the nipponophile fanbois are dedicated and vociferous, there aren't that many of them. What's left after that can be summarized in two letters: EA. And if you're not into American sports or urban driving in the dark, there's pretty much nothing left.
The device itself has power for a handheld, and it shouldn't be hard to make good games for it. Consider that Jurassic Park was modeled and rendered on SGI Indigo workstations with a MIPS R4000 CPU running at 90 MHz, and that the PSP has two MIPS R4000 CPUs, each running at up to 333 MHz...
Re:Emulation (Score:5, Informative)
the psp like the ds has a 'suspend' feature. just push the power switch for a split second up and release and the system goes into suspend and will start up again right where you left off once you do it again. Works in every game no need to get to a save point.
Re:Scapegoat (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a game dev. The consensus among people I know who make games for hand-helds is that the PSP isn't worth developing for because of piracy.
So whatever the people here think, one thing is true. Piracy is killing the PSP. Nobody makes games for a platform when they know the vast majority of the buyers will pay zero.
I know slashdot readers like to stomp and flame and complain about this, but the people you need to whine at are the people hacking PSP games, not game developers who have bills to pay just like everyone else.
Re:Emulation (Score:5, Informative)
PSP, on the other hand, sells like shit
Not really. 45 million sales is almost as much as the Wii, or the combined sales of the PS3 and 360. Only the DS leads it by a significant amount: 55 million more.
Re:My PSP is hacked. (Score:3, Informative)
Avoid superglue, unless you're very skillful with it. The vapours from the glue collect inside the casing and ruin the UMD. Almost all of my discs are in a similar condition to yours due to a poor game case choice.