Gaming PSP: Did piracy kill it, or was it just a bad console?

[Zero]

I've been getting sick of people saying piracy killed the PSP. They always say "the PSP could have been so much better if people didn't pirate" and stuff like that. I mean, really, was piracy THAT big of a problem on PSP that developers decided against developing for it JUST BECAUSE OF THAT? I mean, look at the DS, or the Wii. Both had piracy that was (arguably) more prelevent than the PSP, and those consoles are still getting new games. So, my question is. Does the PSP really have that bad of a piracy issue, or is it just a bad system?

 

[Another World]

its pretty laughable how the piracy issue for the psp played out. i really think piracy hurt the psp, and i'm sure some developers passed on certain games because of it.

-another world

 

[Foxi4]

...and why exactly told you that the PSP did "badly"?

According to wikipedia, as of September 2011, it sold 71,4 million units worldwide and it still sells. It's been a year since then and I can't be bothered to check, but I think that with its weekly sales results, pretty soon it's going to match, if not top the GBA's result of 81,51 million, which was considered legendary.

It's not the PSP that's at fault here - if anything, it's the DS that sells in unreasonable quantities. That, and it's also kind of unfair to merge DSi and DS sales as they are two entirely different console families, but I digress. In any case, Nintendo gave good reasons to switch from the DS to the DSi - DSiWare, SD card slot, cameras, all that jazz. A lot of people swapped, thus boosting the overall result. With the PSP, you bought one and you didn't need to buy another - there was never any groundbreaking innovation or new, exclusive titles for the revised version like in the case of the DSi, and with little incentive to upgrade, the PSP sales were lower than those of the DS - at least that's my little theory.

My point is, PSP's sales are not bad - in fact, they're quite spectacular, seeing that it was Sony's first attempt at a portable console.

 

[Rydian]

People said the DS printed money for a reason. Everybody and their grandmother has one (literally, grandmothers got them too). Comparing the PSP's sales to that is like taking an olympic gold medal winner, putting him up against Thor, and calling him a failure.

As for the PSP, I've known plenty of people with them (I installed CFW on at least four just in one of my classes), they're just not played nearly as often due to the lack of attractive games. Even a lot of the big-name games on the PSP were non-canon side-story things.

 

[Foxi4]

I'm agreeing with Rydian's first point - the DS/DSi turned ungodly popular, comparing anything to it is pretty much pointless.

I'm not so rad about the second part though - I have to say I'm pretty happy with the PSP's library, I really don't get a lot of people's complaints. To me, it meets expectations, it's relatively spacious, it's got "something for everyone" and it's, for the most part, using the console's capabilities really well.

If anything, the PSP suffered from a rather poor advertising campaign which got "serious" pretty much by the end of its life-cycle, when it was too late for competing with the DS for a slice of the market.

 

[Zero]

Remember, this is about piracy as the factor of the lack of games on PSP. It might have sold well, but come on, you have to admit it really lacks games,

 

[Just Another Gamer]

Remember, this is about piracy as the factor of the lack of games on PSP. It might have sold well, but come on, you have to admit it really lacks games,

Where is the lack of games, hm?

From what I seen its still getting support into next year in Japan while the DS on a whole has no more support and people have moved on to the 3DS or home consoles.

 

[Foxi4]

Remember, this is about piracy as the factor of the lack of games on PSP. It might have sold well, but come on, you have to admit it really lacks games,

I can't admit it because it's not true - it has plenty of games, I'm nowhere near finishing all of the ones I'm interested in, I always find something new that I want to play. Patapon, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter, Persona, God of War and many more - those games are mindblowing and so incredibly memorable. The PSP *does* get support even to this day - God Eater 2 is just around the corner and many titles get both PSP and Vita relases for now. Of course, the PSP will gradually subside, but as of today, it has a memorable and large library of games, and those who disagree simply didn't browse through it. More often than not, I hear that the PSP hasn't got a whole lot of games from people who don't even own a PSP - it's a laughable myth.

I *don't* think that piracy impacted the PSP in a huge way, mainly because piracy simply doesn't impact consoles in a big way in general. By that logic, the DS should bring losses, and it didn't.

 

[Hadrian]

Did piracy kill it, or was it just a piece of shit?

Neither.

It was a very good platform...eventually, once Sony fixed that terrible screen properly and other issues it became a very good system. I wouldn't blame piracy either, piracy is much worse on the DS and on other platforms and they still got many games. People didn't buy many PSP games even before it was hacked and it had some very good games at that time, its just that most games didn't quite have the effort or content on their console counterparts (most were slimmed down versions too) so people skipped over them leaving their PSPs gathering dust.

Still Sony make the same mistakes, I would have thought that they would have looked at how Nintendo do their handheld games, not say copy them (which Sony does anyway) but look at how Nintendo treats them. Games like Kid Icarus 3DS, Mario 3D Land, Luigi's Mansion 2 etc has as much content and effort as Wii title and developed by their main devs, whereas Sony's handheld titles are mostly casts offs (with some exceptions) developed by their C grade developers. That was where the PSP failed, other developers though did so much better and crafted many proper full games but those developers didn't have the huge publishing power as others so they didn't reach many gamers sadly. Sony could have tried to advertise those more but instead chose to go with some crappy titles that used that a camera because they felt that they needed to cater to the casual crowd...nope Sony should have stuck at the crowd that DOES buy their stuff rather than the ones who haven't.

 

[Arm73]

Blah.....I have a PSP, and I modded, and even so, I never bother to play it.
Sure I had fun playing the 2 God of Wars games, and some classic re imaginations lile Castlevania and Ghouls and Ghost.
Everything else with a few exceptions,is just meh....

A lot of people praise it for it's emulation capacity, but I tried nearly every emulator and all of them have the same problem, a terrible screen scaling.
I mean I like to play my games possibly at 1:1 resolution, but because of the PSP resolution, most retro system in this mode display a tiny square in the center of the screen or a blurryi stretched image that even at a fixed aspect ration just doesn't look right.
The only machine that doesn't suffer from this problem is the GB, since you can have a clean 2x mode with square pixels.
Everything above that just looks wrong.
I mean Why couldn't have equipped it with a 400x240 or similar type of display ?

The luck of second analog really killed it...mose games ported from the PS2 or even PSX suffered terribly about that.....

Really, as much as I wanted to like it and love it, I just couldn't care any less about my PSP.

And it's not fair to say we should split DS/DSi sales !
It's the same handled of tah same family and they play the same games!
So yeah, I can see myself still playing DS in a few years, but not the PSP.

And if anything, piracy helped the system, without it, I wouldn't have purchased one in the first place!

 

[Fazermint]

The PSP can't compete with the DS, but that doesn't mean it's shit. It only has half the amount of games of what the DS had, but that's because the DS has insanely many games.

 

[emigre]

Because soulsnatcher made a shit load of posts declaring it was dead...

The PSP library may not be as plentiful as the DS library but it has a lot of quality. The best five handheld games I've played in the last five years were PSP titles.

 

[Arras]

Honestly this is my own opinion but there were only a few games for the PSP that interested me. I got bored of most of the games everyone called great very fast. A few examples: God of War was okay but not great. Kind of short as well. I got bored of Patapon and Ratchet and Clank pretty soon and didn't really like LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid, Dissidia Final Fantasy and Persona. Honestly the only games I really liked were Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Lumines, Project Diva (extend) and Valkyria Chronicles 2. Oh and Burnout Legends was pretty cool. But still, that's only 5 games. I still have my PSP lying around somewhere, but it has been collecting dust for about a year now.

 

[Just Another Gamer]

The PSP can't compete with the DS, but that doesn't mean it's shit. It only has half the amount of games of what the DS had, but that's because the DS has insanely many games.

Which alot of them were shovelware. The PSP doesn't get alot of this shovelware crap so its obvious it would have a smaller library.

Honestly this is my own opinion but there were only a few games for the PSP that interested me. I got bored of most of the games everyone called great very fast. A few examples: God of War was okay but not great. Kind of short as well. I got bored of Patapon and Ratchet and Clank pretty soon and didn't really like LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid, Dissidia Final Fantasy and Persona. Honestly the only games I really liked were Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Lumines, Project Diva (extend) and Valkyria Chronicles 2. Oh and Burnout Legends was pretty cool. But still, that's only 5 games. I still have my PSP lying around somewhere, but it has been collecting dust for about a year now.

Out of all those games you listed that people said were great I disagree with that thought since none of them interest me either. Alot of the ones I felt were great no one bothered to play like Persona 1-3, Nendoroid Generations, Fate EXTRA, Weib Schwarz, Sol Trigger. Before I got really hooked on my Android phone I played my PSP alot and loved it much more than my DS.

 

[dickfour]

The PSP has about as many good titles as the DS. The only thing the PSP lacked was all the shovel ware of the DS like Barbie cake maker and friends part VI. If piracy could have killed anything it would have been the DS.

 

[Fazermint]

Yep, half of the DS games are crap, so game quantity isn't really a factor. I still believe the DS has a better selection of games. I'm getting off topic here, this was never a DS vs. PSP thread

 

[Guild McCommunist]

The day when over 50 million console sales constitutes a "poorly performing console" is the day when we change the definition of "poorly performing console".

For a handheld competing in a Nintendo-dominated market, it did rather well. It had a solid library (I would take it over the DS one to an extent) and was a really well done console. Had a lot of features and some of the stuff it brought to the table has since carried over as a staple of handhelds.

 

[mrgone]

for many poeple, the defining factor for a playstation is the existance of a gran turismo-game.
and we all know how long that took on the psp, and what we got at the end

 

[xist]

As much as Sony's complete cack handed treatment of the PSP was to blame (with total PS3 focus and all but forgetting the need to promote the PSP), Piracy did play a significant role in the PSP's reception by Publishers. The PSP simply never got a break on the hacking scene....within days (and even hours in some cases) hacks could enable everything that OFW could and more. I even remember an article in Edge magazine written around the time of Sony's introduction of PSX emulation - it detailed how Dark Alex had effectively one-upped Sony with his custom PSX popstation and effectively proven how easy it was to do.

If Sony had concentrated on really supporting and pushing the PSP, then piracy may not have got the hold it did, but the hacks never really lost pace with the security, and a Publisher looking at the software sales figures of the PSP and reading some of the articles about it's hacking scene would naturally be concerned.

I think that if there'd been a little more lag in the hacking scene the PSP would have fared much better. It was well documented the disparity between hardware and software sales (down to CFW and ISO Loaders?) and whilst you might say that piracy fuelled the PSP units selling, the return is in the software (which no-one bought), leading to fewer publishers wanting to take the risk, and Sony's absence in supporting it's handheld was the finishing touch. Whilst piracy is endemic on the DS too, the sheer quantity of people who own a DS and buy games, and the ease at which shovelware could be put out, minimise the effect of the costs of piracy...it's a loss but not a wounding blow. The PSP was effectively haemorrhaging it's life away during it's run thanks to support, numbers and security.

 

[Blaze163]

My PSP was justifying the money I spent on it long before I hacked it. Monster Hunter was damn near enough to justify the purchase alone. As time went on I did get a little jaded with the PSP as the list of great titles did seem to get quite alarmingly short compared to the DS, but it still had enough worth playing to warrant keeping it around. Gods Eater Burst, Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, the Ace Combat X games, plenty worth picking up.

When the PSP 'died' and from my perspective the release list slowed to a trickle of annually craptastic sports games, I was about ready to give up the PSP. It didn't seem worth it any more. Then I found out you could hack the damn thing and play Monster Hunter Freedom 3 in English if you did so. Then I found out about the wealth of emulators and other goodies available to pirates. I don't feel guilty about hacking my PSP because I gave it every chance to impress me, and for a while it did. I only hacked it when Sony dropped the ball in the most epic way and the system lost pretty much all support. If they'd have continued releasing decent games for it, like an Uncharted game, for example, I would have kept the faith for a while longer. But when piracy is giving me what staying legit is not, I pick my side and I stand by the decision.