Q-Games Gone PSP-Shy Due To Pixeljunk Monsters Piracy

Q-Games head Dylan Cuthbert says he's hesitant to port any more titles to PSP after witnessing the impact of piracy on sales of tower defense title PixelJunk Monsters. Talking to fans and media on his Twitter account, Cuthbert said: "I don't think we'll port anything else to the PSP, we have to see how PJMD does as there's a *lot* of piracy." Cuthbert elaborated that Monsters' "good fit" for the platform makes it especially attractive to pirates, and says he hopes they'll ultimately buy the full version "out of guilt." If the theory is that pirates are helping themselves to a free demo and may later pay for the game, why not just offer a demo, as suggested by a fan who bemoaned the relative dearth of demos for PSP games? "A PSP demo is in the works," said Cuthbert, "but I don't think it makes any difference to piracy." The PSP in particular has long been an attractive platform to pirates, prompting Sony to consider piracy prohibitions with every revision to the hardware it makes. For example, the battery in the new PSP Go is placed such that it can't easily be opened without critically damaging the hardware, a design decision Sony has stated is designed to discourage tampering with it to the fullest possible extent. The lack of a removable battery is an obstacle to hackers trying to modify official firmware.