Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) isn't fond of piracy, naturally, especially with its particularly vulnerable PlayStation Portable (PSP). The corporation's Senior VP of Marketing Peter Dille says they are now seeing especially high numbers of people pirating games on torrent websites, something they'd like to see done away with, and not just for themselves:

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille explains. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly."

"It's not good for us, but it's not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."

Upgrades to the firmware aimed at closing 'loopholes' is one method they've been using pirates are probably aware of already, though some simply don't acquire them, which means a lot potential stolen software -- 50 million machines multipled by x number of games...well, you get the picture. However, it's important to be reminded a pirated game doesn't necessarily mean a lost sale, especially when demos and rentals aren't very common.

Happily, Sony appears to be taking a progressive approach in addition to legal stuff and the firmware upgrades -- Dille believes pirates could be convinced to pay for the games "if they understood [that piracy] meant that a platform would go away." Having spoken directly with some of the folks he is talking about, we'd have to agree. Sometimes at least (this is not always the case), there is an ignorance there where the player simply doesn't take the 'support' factor into account; it's not so much that he's a 'thief', it's simply a lack of consideration.

"I'm not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest," he says. "We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music -- everyone was doing it. It's almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, "If everyone's doing it, then it can't be that bad."

"But, it actually is bad; it's bad for the platform. Again, I'm not saying that that's a magic wand; I think that we have to make sure from a technological perspective that it's not as easy as it is to do that."

Of course, the music industry is an almost entirely different beast and has multiple avenues for revenue (the one everyone wants isn't even explored, yet) whereas video games really only have one (sure, there's merchandising, but how much does that really make?). More, records are much, much less expensive to produce (thousands versus millions), and can be very cheap.

In any case, Dille seems to have his head on straight with this one, which is a nice change from the usual 'pirates are evil, ruining the world, etc.' rhetoric we're used to seeing.