Piracy of PlayStation Portable games and the utilization of the device as a piracy machine are on the downturn, according to Sony’s hardware marketing head John Koller. A two-month downturn, that is. In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Koller said that it wasn’t a “secret” that there “has been some piracy on the PSP,” but maintained that it is “trending down right now” as a result of first-party downloads through the PlayStation store.
The exact numbers weren’t related in the interview, but Koller cited that fighting piracy is a hard task and requires a bit of “Matlocking” on the part of Sony. From the interview:
We’ve noticed there’s kind of a ‘good vs. evil’ battle that we track on many of the forums and many of the pirated web sites. There’s certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP. And then there’s certainly the other side that believes that they can take as warranted. It’s kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us.
I never saw the piracy fight like Batman versus The Joker, but I’m all about continued fighting if that is what is really going on. I also don’t think piracy results from laziness like Koller is possibly indicating. Granted, accessible downloads are nice, but I think people are stealing games because they don’t want to pay for them.
What do you guys think? How do you view the piracy war?
