God of War Dev Claims Piracy Almost Makes PSP Development Pointless

867 Views 2 Replies 2 Participants Last post by Ares, Oct 28, 2010

Ares

Discussion Starter · Oct 28, 2010

God of War Dev Claims Piracy Almost Makes PSP Development Pointless
10/27/2010 Written by Mike Hartnett

Those who have been enjoying Sony’s mighty little handheld, the PSP, over the past five years, have probably noticed the size of the console’s game library in comparison to other handhelds like the DS. Both suffer from pretty significant piracy issues, but none worse than the PSP, which is prompting God of War devs to sound-off on the issue.

God of War: Ghost of Sparta is all set to go on the PSP, but Ready At Dawn creative director Ru Weerasuriya isn’t at all happy about the rampant piracy problem on the console, which will undoubtedly cut into sales. This bleak outlook prompted the following comments:

“getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense to make games on it [PSP].”
“I’m not very familiar with how it is on the DS, but on the PSP [piracy is] pretty rampant now all around the world.”

“It’s getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense to make games on it, if the piracy keeps on increasing. It’s a tough call right now to say what’s going to happen to it and where it’s going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games.”

“The PC market has had connectivity and multiplayer, which brings down the piracy, and a lot of the PC games right now, the big ones at least, require you to be logged into a specific network – like Battlenet, when I used to work at Blizzard – that controls it, and has made it easy to curb some of that,”

“You can go to Hong Kong and get one cart for the DS with practically every single game that’s ever come out for it. It’s pretty scary to think that it’s got to this extent.”

With new custom firmwares which match their official Sony counterparts pretty much tit for tat, releasing within weeks of Sony’s, it’s no wonder that security and game developers can’t keep up. Perhaps if Sony had embraced the idea of an open platform for homebrew, while simultaneously investing all their time into curbing illegitimate ISO loading, piracy wouldn’t be so bad and gamers would still be happy publishing and sharing their own content, but that, of course, comes with its own share of obstacles. Let’s just hope the PSP Phone or PSP2 don’t face these issues as well, because happy developers ultimately lead to happy gamers.

Source: PSLS

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GranteedEV

· #2 · Oct 28, 2010

The PSP barely has piracy issues. Most PSPs have firmware set so you can't play pirated games, and there exist no pc emulators for the device. This is just sony blowing things far out of proportion to overprotect their intellectual property.

The DS OTOH may have legit piracy issues, but those games sell because more people have DS'.

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Ares

Discussion Starter · #3 · Oct 28, 2010

There are PSP emulators out there, also there is a way of getting pirated games to work on the PSP which involves a few things you need to do but I won't get into details since I don't condone the practice.
While piracy on the PSP hasn't reached the level of the DS it's still more common than you would think mostly though in Asia, it happens here and in Europe but not like Asia.

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