Sony announced that PlayStation Portable (PSP) piracy has been declining the past few months, with more consumers willing to go to the store to purchase legal games.
Sony PSP Product Manager John Koller admitted there has been a problem with PSP piracy games, but the numbers have dropped during the fall.
"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," Koller recently told Multiplayer. "There are 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."
Even though Sony said piracy is declining, this recently published article on TorrentFreak begs to differ: "It is unclear where Sony sourced this data, but statistics gathered from BitTorrent trackers show an increase in PSP piracy."
Final Fantasy VII and GTA: Vice City have been the two most popular pirated PSP games on BitTorrent. FF VIII was pirated 650,000 times while GTA: VC was downloaded an estimated 550,000 times throughout 2008, Sony reported. The Dissida: Final Fantasy video game was downloaded 200,000 times over the past five days -- an average PSP game has 133,000 confirmed sales per title.
Even with the increase of pirated video games, video game sales still have been impressive -- more game units were sold in November 2008 compared to 2007.
Game piracy is an issue that all game studios are trying to deal with, but they walk a fine line in their attempt. The use of DRM is now becoming even more popular, but many gamers find it invasive, and will rather pirate or not buy a game with the technology.
