2008 was not a banner year for the PSP in North America, with a software release list that could nicely be called thin. That was in part due to developers nearly abandoning the platform.


Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, tells Gamasutra that third-party publishers were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform," some of which may be chalked up to massive amounts of PSP software piracy.

Dille says that "piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP" and that the company is pursuing both legal and educational efforts to decrease it.


"It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community," Dille tells Gamasutra. "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."

One of those changes may be a move to more digitally distributed titles, as games like echochrome and Patapon 2 go download only.

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Sony: Piracy Has Taken 'Big Chunk Of Game Sales' From PSP [Gamasutra]