John Koller, SCEA hardware marketing head, has stated that piracy of PSP games is in decline, at least in the last couple of months.

Piracy of PSP games, as we know, has always been an issue on the PSP, and one that has followed Sony’s every step on the way to the current 5.03 firmware, as each successive firmware release has swiftly been followed by a custom firmware version that has allowed pirated (ISO) games to be played.

Sony is hoping that by offering content via the PSN store as direct downloads will help combat the overall issue of piracy, by making games more easily available for instant gratification. If Sony offer content cheap enough, it may well convince people to move away from illegal game sharing sites and actually buy some games.

I’ve always been a staunch supporter of Sony, and rarely talk about playing backup copies of games as I believe it does more harm than good for the future of the PSP. However, it does appear piracy is a widespread issue, and one that I believe has helped with ensuring we get very few new game titles out on the PSP.

It may be that piracy is dropping because there are so few games coming out at the moment, or maybe there is a turning tide against piracy, as John Koller puts it – “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 web sites,” laughed 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.”

Via: multiplayerblog.mtv