PSPiracy

Sony's playstation portable is arguably one of the most powerful and versatile portable media devices on the market today. It can play games, allow listen to your favorite music, immerse you in dvd quality movies in wide screen format and it can even surf the web and with an added attachment, let you talk with your friends via skype. Yet, there seems to be a lack of games in the market as of late. December and January offered no new releases in the North American market . February only offered 3 new titles namely: Bejewelled 2, Star Ocean second evolution, and DJ max Fever. Rumors abound as to the reason for the lack of games. One rumor goes that Sony is planning to launch the psp 2 and so game developers aren't making anymore titles for the psp format. Another rumor has it that Sony is phasing out the psp and its proprietary data storage format, the universal media disc, in favor of the memory stick which would be used to store games in the upcoming psphone, in answer to the growing popularity of the iphone. My take on the matter is that piracy is the reason why there are so few games being released. Anyone who has bought a psp here in the Philippines knows that it's really quite easy to modify the unit to play games that you can download via the net. I mean, why spend P2500 on a UMD when you can just download the games for free? This might all seem well and good but the effect is that there really is no incentive for game developers to make games for the platform given that piracy is so rampant. Perhaps Sony should learn from the PC platform and develop strategies to entice psp owners to buy orginal software. One of the most popular strategies that encouraged pc gamers to go legit was the multiplayer aspect. Games like COD 4 and World of Warcraft show impressive sales due mainly to the fact that multiplayer is so fun to play in these games. Another effective strategy is price adjustment for different regions. There used to be a time when buying an original pc game would set you back P5,000 so it really wasn't practical to buy a game that you could just download. But now, original pc games can go as low as P1,200 like GTA IV for example (and this game has two dvds). While this is still expensive, the price has gone down low enough for the Philippine gaming market to afford. While I'm still hanging on to my psp, I have grim hopes of ever getting a game selection as varied as say the nintendo ds if Sony doesn't turn things around.