Sony is making efforts to see their PlayStation Portable platform rebound, and seems to be meeting with some degree of success, according to Sony Computer Entertainment America's Senior Vice President of Marketing, Peter Dille. 18 months prior, however, third-party developers for the platform were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform."

He tells Gamasutra that they had "evangelized" to developers about going beyond PlayStation 2 ports and creating games which "make sense" for the platform, thus yielding titles such as Dissidia Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed, and Rock Band, with more to follow.

However, the PSP still has one monkey on its back which waits to thwart sales further, and we don't mean Donkey Kong.

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," Dille explains. "It's been a problem that the industry has to address together; it's one that I think the industry takes very seriously, but we need to do something to address this because it's criminal what's going on, quite frankly."

"It's not good for us," he adds, "but it's not good for the development community. We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."

Talk of hardware upgrades to further iterations of the platform in order to halt piracy have been speculated, but even so, there's still the matter of all the older hardware which is already on the market, complicating the situation. Even if they plug the leaky hole, there's still a potential 50 million units of water in the basement to deal with.

"Those numbers are correct," Dille says. "There's a lot of hardware out there; toothpaste is out of the tube. We're not going to get that hardware back into the toothpaste container."

Dille goes on to say that Sony is targeting a "multi-pronged approach," one which factors in both the legality of the situation, as well as educating their customers. Hoping that problematic PSP owners possess a shred of morality, he thinks that "if they understood [that piracy] meant that a platform would go away."

"I'm not naive, but I do think that most people are inherently honest," he says. "We learned a lot from the music business, and it became so easy and so common to download illegal music -- everyone was doing it. It's almost like people lost sight with the fact that, well, 'If everyone's doing it, then it can't be that bad.'"

"But, it actually is bad; it's bad for the platform. Again, I'm not saying that that's a magic wand; I think that we have to make sure from a technological perspective that it's not as easy as it is to do that."

Dille goes into greater detail on the state of Sony in 2009 at Gamasutra.