Sony Helping Developers Combat PSP Piracy

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Sony’s Rob Dyer, one of the louder voice from Sony that has been speaking out against piracy on the PSP has been speaking out once again. He sat down with Gamasutra and chatted with them in depth on a number of issues. During the interview, he casually mentioned that Sony is giving engineering support to developers to prevent their PSP games from being pirated.

Dyer said, regarding what the PSP will have in store for it at E3 this year:

A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we’re very excited about, because they are huge titles. And we also believe that there’s a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. 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. 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.

Some on the web have suggested that this “code” is actually similar to what Sony, EA and THQ are doing where you have to pay some amount of money ($5, $10, $20) to unlock a game’s online functionality. But Mr. Dyer sounded he was talking more about something more technical than a gimmick to make money off used games.

At any rate, Sony’s new anti-piracy code will hopefully be unnoticeable and unobtrusive to the paying legit gamer. So many of these DRM schemes end up hampering the paying customer, too.

It’s unclear if this new PSP anti-piracy code will be revealed to the public, or just shown to developers behind closed doors.