Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior VP of marketing, Peter Dille, has admitted that the PlayStation Portable has been hit hard by piracy - with as many as 50 million units in the marketplace potentially having been compromised.
"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille told Gamasutra. "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 admission comes at a point when Sony is finally giving the handheld platform a significant boost, with a string of key titles set to hit the shelves this year, including Assassin's Creed and MotorStorm - but Dille agreed that older hardware could pose an ongoing problem for genuine software sales.
"Those numbers are correct," he said, referring to the 50 million units. "There's a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We're not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container.
500 million online games since June last year, as FIFA and NFL each clock over 2.4 million registered users
EA is flaunting the popularity of its online game services by announcing that its Sports label has clocked 500m online games since June last year.
EA says that an average of 2.2 million online games have been played each day since June, when the publisher first started releasing its 2009 EA Sports product line. This level of online play reflects an increase of more than 175 percent from the same period last year, the publisher said.
The simple equation here being that hardware sales have just as much a significant effect on tie ratios as software does. Tie ratios are, after all, total software numbers divided by total hardware.
As the PS3 failed to get many new customers, its current users had many more games to purchase over the late months of 2008. The Wii, meanwhile, is selling incredibly well despite an inordinarily low turnout of significant titles.
Either way, the Xbox 360 looks best of the three when viewed from a tie-ratio angle.
Both the Wii and PS3 were released in November 2006, so the most recent tie ratio figures show each system&rsquo,free psp game;s performance after 29 months at retail. In examining the Xbox 360’s tie ratio after the same 29-month period, Microsoft’s box shows itself to have a significantly more impressive balance, at 7.5.
Interestingly, the console’s tie ratio rate has plateaued somewhat in the last eight months, as the figure in August 2008 was at 8.0 whereas today it has edged up to 8.3.
“The massive migration to online gaming has transformed the video game landscape, and this week's 500 millionth online EA Sports game highlights the radical shift that we've helped pioneer in the industry,” said Peter Moore, president of the division.
EA also provided a number of different angles to view its online volumes, stating that “4 billion minutes” of EA Sports games have been played since June, and that &ldquo,psp games download;35 years” of online play is amassed each day.
Both NFL 09 and FIFA 09 have over 2.4 million registered online users each, the company added.
"I'm not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest," he continued. "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,psp games, 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."
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