Sony America senior VP of marketing Peter Dille, has spoken out today about the rampant piracy attached to the PSP handheld, saying that over 50 million units have been “compromised.”
“I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP,” Dille said. “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.
“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites 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.”
Dille says that older hardware units are the most problematic but hopes that upcoming blockbuster titles such as Assassin’s Creed and MotorStorm should help struggling software sales.
“Those numbers are correct,” he added, speaking of the 50 million units figure. “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.
“I’m not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest. We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music - everyone was doing it. It’s almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, ‘If everyone’s doing it, then it can’t be that bad.’
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Result for: hardware units
Microsoft’s GDC keynote speaker, John Schappert has announced that the Xbox 360 has reached another milestone, over 18 million units sold worldwide.
“I think that we’ve sold 18 million, the last time I’ve checked. 18 million hardware units worldwide,” said Schappert. He would not however, project sales for the rest of 2008.
The speaker also went on to say that the company would probably not even bother with an external Blu-ray drive for the console simply because the HD DVD add-on sold poorly.
“We have no plans to announce anything like that right now. But I’d also urge you to look at the attach rate for the HD-DVD drive,” he noted. “It was a 3 percent attach rate…you also have to take into account how did the other accessory do when you look at the future.”
