MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The level of piracy endured on PSP has rendered it an obsolete platform for developers, according to the developer behind the upcoming God of War: Ghost of Sparta.
Speaking to VG247 creative director Ru Weerasuriya said of piracy that: I’m not very familiar with how it is on the DS, but on the PSP it’s pretty rampant now all around the world.
It’s getting to the point where it doesn’t make sense to make games on it, if the piracy keeps on increasing. It’s a tough call right now to say what’s going to happen to it and where it’s going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games.”
Weerasuriya even goes as far as to say that piracy is a bigger problem for the handheld market than it is the PC sector.
The PC market has had connectivity and multiplayer, which brings down the piracy, and a lot of the PC games right now, the big ones at least, require you to be logged into a specific network – like Battlenet, when I used to work at Blizzard – that controls it, and has made it easy to curb some of that.
On portable platforms it’s definitely more rampant right now. You can go to Hong Kong and get one cart for the DS with practically every single game that’s ever come out for it.”
And despite having previously claimed prior to the announcement of Ghost of Sparta that the studio is done with PSP development, Weerasuriya now insists that it’s time for something new at the company.
After two games on PSP with Daxter and Chains of Olympus, we thought that was it for us. We even sent our dev kits back,” he added. But we talked to them [Sony], they talked to us, they definitely wanted a second game. It was a push on both sides that made this happen.
This time – I know this is like the boy who cried wolf, but this time we are definitely done. We have pushed the PSP as far as possible; we’ve even had to scale back because some things were not doable.
We’ve done the absolute maximum with it. As a team we believe we have leveraged 100 percent of its power.”
