SCEA’s Rob Dyer has admitted that PSP as a platform has some problems in the US, particularly with software sales.
Speaking with Gamasutra, Dyer said that over in Japan the PSP is a good seller on a weekly basis.
“It’s killing it in Japan. [In North America] you have Peace Walker that I think is going to do very good numbers,” he said. “You’re going to have some phenomenal support from Square. They have some great stuff coming. You have some great stuff from Capcom.
“Again, it’s a lot of stuff from Japan [but] we have EA Sports stuff that’s going to be coming out. You’re going to have Toy Story 3 on the PSP that’s coming out. There’s a number of titles from American publishers that will be there, but are we getting full-line support?
“No. I’m not going to bullshit you on that”.
Dyer also said that poor PSP software sales in the States can partially be blamed on piracy, and to help counter it, Sony has a plan to slow it down for at least 30 to 60 days after a game is released through tech.
“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,” he said.
“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. And the fact that the category shrunk inside of retail”.
According to a report from Gamasutra, the last time a PSP game landed in the top 10 on the NPD software charts was in August 2009.
The game was Dissidia: Final Fantasy, and further research by the industry site found that DS games outsell PSP titles 8 to 1 in US; however, Dyer hopes titles announced at E3 for the platform will help bridge the gap.
“A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we’re very excited about, because they are huge titles, ” he said.
“We’re going to fix retail. First party has done a great job of getting some campaigns in place to do that. We have some very big third-party titles, notably from Japan.
“We will have a good line-up this year. And hopefully, by virtue of that, we’ll carry through to next year as well”.
This mirrors statements Dyer made back in February, and E3 is only a few scant weeks away at this point, so we should know more about these titles soon.
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