The last year has been a wild one for the PlayStation Portable, what with the launch of the PSPgo, lack of UMD support there and a reaffirmed commitment to the UMD format a few months later. SCEA believes piracy played a major role in hurting sales, though, and while PSP 2 rumors for E3 are still just rumors, a senior VP has gone on the record as saying the projects they will announce will come with anti-piracy precautions.
"It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now," SCEA senior vice president of publisher relations Rob Dyer told Gamasutra.
Asked about a fall-off in North American support for the platform, he went as far as to call piracy "the biggest problem, no question about it." Sony will have a response, however, and it sounds like these solutions will come tied to announcements at E3.
"A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we're very excited about, because they are huge titles," Dyer said. "And we also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent."
I have to admit, I was a little bummed that the answer will come in the form coding and not some awesome new hardware. But he didn't rule hardware out in his response! If you can't tell, I'm really pulling for a PSP 2 reveal at E3.
Do you think pirates deserve the blame for the PSP's performance recently? What do you think Sony should do in response? Share your opinions in the comment section below.