Remember all those great PSP titles of days gone by? I’m talking about games like God of War: Chains of Olympus, Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition, Tekken: Dark Resurrection and Patapon to name just a few.
Find out what the hell happened to the PSP in 2008; why fewer games are coming in 2009 and why Piracy on the PSP is one of the Top 100 Moments of 2008 after the jump!
The Playstation Portable was never what one would call “overflowing” with blockbuster titles, but it had more than enough great games to make buying a PSP (as a video game platform) worth it. Alas, the future is not looking even half as good as the past as far as great games go. For every AAA title we get, there is about 6 “meh” port-overs, badly translated Asian market titles and your general shovel-ware. Worse yet, the amount of big name developers and games focused on the PSP continues to decline and all we (the loyal paying gamers) get is more semi-useful firmware updates, PSP models and accessories. Alongside an endless wave of crap games I wouldn’t play on a DS, let alone on an adult portable gaming device.
At the very heart of the PSP’s trouble is piracy. The PSP has not sold as well as the DS, but it does have a substantial user base, so people have actually spent the money to buy one. Too bad so many PSP users can’t be bothered to pay for PSP games; not when they can download them for free and use custom firmware to play them. Sure, not everyone who has custom firmware is playing pirated games, but most are. Sure, some people download a game and then later purchase it, but most don’t. Sure, the piracy groups on the web advocate buying the games if you like them, they even tell people to support the developers, but they don’t REALLY give a damn, and can’t possibly expect the majority of their followers to buy a game they already have.
If pirates were real gamers, real fans, as they so proudly boast, they’d acknowledge the obvious; that they are killing the PSP as a gaming platform. Even more than the piracy problems facing PC Gaming (which survives to a large extent on the MMO market these days), the PSP is hurting real bad. Every time one of these douche bag pirate groups rips a game, developers lose money, a lot of money. If they don’t make money selling their games, they’ll stop making them. This is not rocket science, it’s common bloody sense. Arguably one of the best, if not THE best of the PSP developers, Ready at Dawn, has already said they will not be making PSP games anymore. Not because their games were not critically acclaimed, because they were, or that the games they made (God of War: Chains of Olympus for example) weren’t popular, because they were, but rather because there is simply no money in it for them.
What does this mean for the future? It means the PSP’s future release list looks about as empty as a Vegan restaurant in Amarillo (huge beef town FYI), Texas. Patapon 2, Resistance: Retribution and maybe the new Monster Hunter Freedom: Unite are about the only games we can look forward to. That’s assuming of course that your interested in all three of those titles. Personally, I really just want Patapon 2 and I may give Retribution a whirl if the reviews are good. Otherwise, all you have to look forward to is more kiddy garbage like Hotel For Dogs or the almost assuredly crappy movie tie-in games like Terminator: Salvation and X-men Origins: Wolverine.
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PacManPolarBear, are you kidding me?! Look at the major public torrent sites, the DS piracy is booming right now, only 1 out of games is a PSP game. The difference is, the DS has more users who doesn’t give a damn about hacking their system, whereas most PSP users buy the system with custom fw in mind. So the simple truth is, the user base is higher on Nintendo handheld sytem, and despite the piracy, it’s still going strong.
^ Lol. True, the DS has a lot of piracy too. But the DS has nothing to offer me in terms of graphics, or games I want to play, and is in no danger of running out of “quality” *haha* games…if you like the DS that is.
I have seen a lot of custom fw that I really like, stuff I wish Sony would add, but the correlation between custom fw and piracy on the PSP makes it do more harm than good.
Don’t rag on the DS just because you want to be a cheer leader of the PSP for the day. Seriously, is this sarcasticgamer.com or PSP.com? I am being assaulted with PSP everywhere I turn.
I hate to be a conspirator, but maybe all that ps3 bashing done recently is being made up for with extreme gratuitous ass kissing.
^ LoL That made my day!
Great article PacMan. I certainly don’t pirate PSP games…but I’ve not played a game on my PSP in weeks.
piracy is the end of all things as we know it, EA told me so
Piracy is never something to welcome, although I have to argue on behalf of the PC…. systems like Steam and Impulse are as much if not more then answer then MMOs… The day of going to your local game store and buying a PC title is going away fast, but the void is being filled nicely (and with a higher profit margine due to no physical media production).
Well the other answer is for people to control themselves and STOP PIRATING, but Im not counting on that… after all, people have been stealing since people have been making… maybe before.
So, piracy is killing the PSP, even though the DS has a MUCH more rampant pirating scene. Last I heard, the PSP ran a risk of becoming a brick if you put custom firmware on it and didn’t do it right.
I seriously doubt that piracy is the main reason that the PSP isn’t doing well. When a system that has pretty much nothing to keep out pirates is doing better than you, you really can’t cry “piracy!”
Instead, I think it’s the fact that developers are being lazy when it comes to the system. When was the last time we saw a MUST have PSP game?
^ This year? Patapon – Feb. God of War: Chains of Olympus – Mar.
If you brick your PSP adding custom firmware, with the insane amount of instructions available, you had no place trying in the first place. The fact it is so easy is why it is so rampant.
The DS is also a much less expensive system, with WAY more owners and WAY more games that cost a fair amount less. The super low cost of being a DS gamer means that a lot of DS gamers don’t even bother stealing. Yeah you can find LOTS of torrents for DS games, there are more DS games…kind of a given. But I doubt the same percentage of DS users steal compared to the percentage of PSP gamers that do.
DS games are also much cheaper to make, so they don’t take half the hit from piracy as PSP developers do.
All that said, piracy DOES hurt the DS a hell of a lot too. Never said it didn’t and it was never a competition between the two. But the PSP is definitely suffering more.
True. It is easy if you know what you’re doing, but I’m sure plenty of people don’t want to run that risk.
I get what you’re saying, but I don’t believe piracy is the reason we don’t get many quality PSP games. It doesn’t help, but their are other factors too.
If there were more games like God of War or Lunimes or Crisis Core, then we really wouldn’t be having this conversation.
im starting to lean twords piracy because after just a week of having my psp it wont read disks anymore. i mean common a week that’s ridiculous i even had the latest firmware installed.
i don’t know where you are from but i m from india and one thing is sure that i cant waste my money on a UMD which costs me around 2000Rs. (its big amount in india) for a game of about 2 days.
psp costs me around 10000Rs.