Ru Weerasuriya, creative director at Ready At Dawn - who's about to launch God of War: Ghost of Sparta on PSP - says that rampant piracy on the platform is "getting to the point where it doesn't make sense to make games on it."

Speaking to VG247, Weerasuriya (say that 10 times quickly) said: "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."

He goes on: "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."

He goes on to state that piracy on the handhelds is an even bigger problem now than it is on PC: "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," he said.

"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."

It's sad that a platform could be killed off by piracy, but that's looking more like a reality as time goes on. Let's all be nice and buy Ghost of Sparta, shall we? It looks mint, to be fair.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=272071

Crap and a lack of games are holding the PSP back, mostly.

Online accounts might stop piracy but they are also a huge deterrent to the resale of games. That longer term could also be a problem for games designers. Lack of fresh money coming into the market.

If there weren't any decent games, there wouldn't be any piracy, surely? The fact is there are a lot of decent games for the PSP, just as many as any other platform, more or less. Course it rather depends on your quality threshold but there are certainly as many decent 'hardcore' games on the PSP as the DS, which rather suffers from the mass epidemic of 'Imagine....' games and clones of popular casual franchises.

The platform has actually reached a reasonable population level - I think they've sold something like 30m of them world wide - but the release schedule has slowed to a crawl ever since the thing reached the point where it was congenitally insecure. Sony would update the firmware and it would get cracked within days, every time. Now, you can crack your PSP (which is literally 'run a program on your PC with the PSP plugged into it'), go to usenet and download pretty much any game you like. It also has the disadvantage that it's games are quite small, unlike say 360 or PS3 games, which makes them more 'portable' (pun intended).

The PSP is the perfect example of where the whole 'oh no, we only want to break the protection so we can run home brew stuff' argument breaks down. It's very possible the people saying that mean it, but the bare fact is a lot of people will pirate stuff if they have the opportunity, so once the tools are out there, that's what a lot of people will use them for.

I don't know if the PSP would have been a 'success' if it hadn't been cracked - because frankly I think it was always onto a loser against the Gameboy 'family' anyway - but I do know that the reduction in development of PSP games is down to the fact the games that do come out don't sell very well very often. And if the games don't sell very well but the hardware does, and the platform has been hacked, what other conclusion is there to come to than the one that people are acquiring their games by 'other means'?

The PSP has other issues of course - price for one - but to suggest that the hacking/piracy issue isn't a major contributor to the fact producers don't want to support it is naive and doesn't really hold up to analysis.

Thing is, consumer lethargy seems to be the main issue with the PSP owners I know, every one of them saying there's no games worth buying, some mentioning the cost of them. None of these people are downloading their PSP games, even though they download films, music... That's not to say others aren't downloading, but the people I know with PSPs range from kids to people in their 30s and 40s.

It's what's killing the DS and Wii too*, to my mind.

Of course, as you say, some people will download anything just because they can.

On the producer front, I think the bigger issue is that the PSP doesn't have much of an image, presence, whatever you wanna call it. Can't remember the last time I saw a PSP or PSP game ad anywhere, for instance

I thought this was an unusually realistic take regarding the DS:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010- ... poor-sales

* Alongside the mainstream music industry.

I have not bothered with a PSP. I think that the iPhone might actually have a better business model. The games are downloaded but dirt cheap. I have no idea about DRM in iPhone games but I would imagine that there is some. The revenue splits are generous to developers with a 70% share, so with low prices a low cost pile it high sell it cheap model works. The problem for Nintendo is that if games are not selling well then they are just going to lose money developing games for the PSP.

It's so obvious. My gaming budget is about £10 a year, and I imagine a lot of kids are similar. That's 1 game every 4 years on some platforms, about a game a month on a phone or any number of freebies. Needless to say, I mostly play the freebies. There's a reason Farmville has more players than every PSP game put together.

There's no frickin' way I'm paying £30 on a game (that's a month's groceries or heating!), but if you could play a pirate version for free then any number of people might be tempted.

I do not have a set budget but some years I spend nothing. This year I have spent £50, mainly on Star Craft and a few old console games. PSP games were expensive, but I suspect a large part was Sony's licensing fees.

Part of the problem is that while PSP games can be had quite cheaply - the average shelf price is 20 quid ish and the 'classics' range are a tenner each - and there are some REALLY good games in there - On the online store the average price for new games is like over 30 quid, which is way too much. especially if you've got a PSP Go, you're stuck paying prices that are much worse than the shop prices.

Jon