Piracy has been a huge thorn in the side of developers and publishers this generation. Â PC games which have always had a strong base of players which pirate the software for their computers is still prevalent, but pirates have moved into consoles as well at an alarming rate. Â Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have both seen their fair share of piracy this generation. Â From the PlayStation Jailbreak which allowed users to pirate PS3 software, to the Xbox 360 modifications that allowed players to download and play games directly from their hard drive, both companies have also seen their system security fall to the will of the hacker.
However, one publishers went on record to claim that the PlayStation 3 has dealt with piracy better than all other consoles this generation. Â The efforts to combat the unscrupulous players, the threat of legal trouble to homebrew developers, and constant firmware upgrades have helped keep developers and publishers keep more of their profits when selling games on the PlayStation 3. Â Capcom’s Christian Svensson recently said in an interview:
“Piracy exists on almost every console to varying degrees. The only one I would say is fairly inconsequential to our business, as much as we can tell, is PlayStation 3. Obviously the PlayStation 3 was opened up [jailbroken], and through a variety of systems, Sony has managed to largely put that genie back in the bottle, to the point where the scene is nowhere near as large as it is on other platforms.”
With Sony being able to right their piracy woes in such short order, it makes you wonder why Microsoft can’t do the same thing. Â The company who recently moved to a new disc format to assist in keeping pirates at bay, is yet to be a proven method to deterring piracy in the long run.
