Copyright Law

Piracy Hurting PSP Software Sales Declares Sony

By StephenK

In an exclusive interview with Gamasutra Peter Dille Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment of America discussed how he believed piracy had hurt the software sales of the PlayStation Portable. Dille stated, “I’m

convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille explained how he believed the piracy issue needs to be tackled by the industry as a whole stating, “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.”

In the interview Dille singled out Torrent based piracy as one source of Sony’s problems describing the situation as “sickening”. He went on to point out Resistance: Retribution as an example stating, “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.” When piracy is concerned companies often like to describe every illegally downloaded copy as a lost sale. In the past Jack Tretton of Sony stated “We’ve been able to track that hundreds of thousands of sales, in the case of God of War, are walking out the door on day one.”

In the Gamasutra article it is pointed out that even if Sony wanted to implement a hardware based solution to combat the piracy it was too late due to the 50 million units already on the market. Dille stated, “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.” Dille described how Sony planned to tackle the issue from multiple angles including legal avenues and customer education.

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on April 24, 2009 (boomark / email).