Videogame piracy helps sales, says Sony

(electricpig) -- While crafty modders and homebrewers are praised by some of the gaming community, they’re the bane of videogame bigwigs. However, SCEE president David Reeves admits that while piracy “is a problem”, it can help improve sales.

Within months of Sony’s PSP being out, naughty hackers cracked it open, proving that no matter how tough a piece of tech is, there’s always some way to hack into its gadgety innards.

Since then hackers have been able to do almost anything with it, including play games from other consoles, and SCEE are not a bunch of happy bunnies.

“There is a piracy problem on PSP,” Reeves said at the recent DevStation conference in London (MCV reports). “We know about it, we know how it’s done.

“It sometimes fuels the growth of hardware sales, but on balance we are not happy about it,” he said, while explaining that Sony will soon be introducing new measures to tackle piracy on the handheld.

Clouds and silver, anyone? Still, there’s probably a few hackers out there thinking, ‘sounds like a challenge’.