While Sony's PSP is still doing decently in Japan, sales in Western markets have dropped like a stone. PSP software rarely hits the charts, and when it does it's usually not near the top. Square Enix's Dissidia: Final Fantasy was the last PSP title to grace the NPD's Top 10, all the way back in August of 2009. According to analysis over at Gamasutra, titles for the Nintendo DS outsell their PSP counterparts 8-to-1 in North America.
For a system that had the full force and fury of Sony's R&D and marketing machine behind it, the PSP has definitely fallen on hard times. SCEA's Senior Vice President of Publisher Relations, Rob Dyer, sat down with Gamasutra to set the record straight on the PSP's poor performance.
Dyer promised gamers that Sony was looking to beef up the titles coming to the beleaguered platform. "A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we're very excited about, because they are huge titles," he said. SCEA's own God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Konami's Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and Square Enix' Final Fantasy Agito XIII number among the huge titles Dyer speaks of.
Dyer also confronted the looming specter of piracy that's exceptionally prevalent on portable systems. "That's been the biggest problem, no question about it. It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now," admitted Dyer. He says Sony has a solution to "slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days... There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent." No more details were provided about the solution.
Dyer notes that the PSP was dwarfed at retail by the DS, Nintendo's portable juggernaut. "We're going to fix retail. First party has done a great job of getting some campaigns in place to do that,” he said. "We will have a good line-up this year. And hopefully, by virtue of that, we'll carry through to next year as well.”
He made no comments about the oft-rumored PSP2, instead preferring to speak on improvements to the current platform.
