Is PSP Piracy Increasing?

Kris Erickson • Jan 3, 2009 • Comments (0)

The Sony PSP has had its fair share of ups and downs, which is expected for the first generation of any given console. If the device has an achilles heel, however, it has been the ease with which pirates have been able to exploit the system to play games downloaded for free from the internet. Most consoles suffer from some form of piracy (Although so far the PS3 has been holding its ground) but the level of skullduggery on the PSP seems more intense than on other devices.

There were recently sings that Sony had found ways to get the problem under control. Sony’s PSP Product Manager John Koller told journalists recently that “[There] certainly has been some piracy on the PSP. We’ve seen that as a significant issue — it’s trending down right now, we’ve seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months. There are certainly people that are standing up and fighting for hat we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP.”

One of the major victories in the war gainst pirates has been the launch of the new PSP 3000 console. Besides adding specifications like a brighter screen and on-board microphone, the new hardware contains circuit-level encryption that makes it very dificult for hackers to access. While this may change soon, for the moment the PSP 3000 remains unhackable, and this is undoubdtedly something Sony and software makers are happy about.

But has piracy declined the way that John Koller says it has? Online tracking anaysis done by news service Torrentfreak shows that overall levels of PSP piracy are in fact increasing. The researchers found that more PSP games were downloaded online during the year 2008 compared with the previous year, and that the last three months of 2008 showed a major increase in activity. The two most pirated games for the PSP in 2008 were Final Fantasy VII and GTA Vice City Stories, with an estimated 650,000 and 550,000 downloads each.

Vice City has been one of the best-selling titles ont he PSP, with approximately 2.8 million legitimate units sold worldwide since launch. Even with such stellar sales, it is undeniable that piracy has taken a big bite out of Rockstar's potential profits. Please note however that piracy data may not be accurate and may not include all worldwide sources of piracy. In fact, the problem could be even worse than reflected in these numbers.