'Piracy has taken big chunk of game sales from PSP'

Peter Dille, from SCEA, thinks the piracy on the PSP is "sickening" and is not afraid to say that it is a huge problem on the portable platform and that 18 months ago many developers "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform."

In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Dille went on to say "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 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."

The PSP has gone through 3 major iterations during it's life cycle and a fourth is rumored to be coming soon. Many believe that other then the aesthetics that change, the loopholes that open up the portable console to piracy close as well, though Sony has never admitted to that. While it is "relatively" easy to break open the PSP-1000 (known as the fat) and the PSP-2000 (known as the slim) the PSP-3000 (known as the brite) has yet to be cracked.

Dille believes that education and legal actions are the key and that people "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."

Hopefully in 2009 we see a turnaround in game sales, as the PSP has a lot of promise in terms of AAA titles that are soon to be released.