Sony says PSP piracy is on the decline

Sony marketing man John Koller has spoken out about piracy on PSP, saying the company has seen it "trending down" over the past couple of months.

Exactly how it's measured this downturn in piracy remains to be seen, but speaking to MTV Koller says: "We've made really no secret [that there] certainly has been some piracy on the PSP. We've seen that as a significant issue - it's trending down right now, we've seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months."

Could this be attributed to the release of the PSP 3000, which many speculated was released primarily to make life harder for the hackers? Koller doesn't specify, but he does mention Sony keeps a close eye on what gamers are up to online by monitoring forum activities and the like.

"We've noticed there's kind of a 'good vs evil' battle that we track on many of the forums and many of the pirated websites," says apparent forum lurker Koller.

"There's certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP. And then there's certainly the other side that believes that they can take as warranted. It's kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us."

Piracy might be on the downturn presently but, as we reported mere days ago, Datel has released a device that enables PSP 3000's firmware to be altered and homebrew games to be played so it seems unlikely it's going away forever. Still, Sony seems happy chipping away at the problem and ignoring naysayers who predict that homebrew gaming is the reason many people buy PSPs, not the reason it doesn't sell as many games.