Ready at Dawn: PSP piracy "hurts a lot of developers"

God of War: Ghost Of Sparta developer Ready At Dawn has claimed PSP development is endangered by the levels of piracy on Sony's handheld.

"It's pretty rampant now all around the world," creative director Ru Weerasuriya told VG247.

"It's getting to the point where it doesn't make sense to make games on it, if the piracy keeps on increasing.

"It's a tough call right now to say what's going to happen to it and where it's going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games."

He felt the situation was now worse even than on PC. "The PC market has had connectivity and multiplayer, which brings down the piracy.

"A lot of the PC games right now require you to be logged into a specific network – like Battle.Net, when I used to work at Blizzard – that controls it, and has made it easy to curb some of that."

Weerasuriya also expressed concern about the prospects for independent studios such as Ready At Dawn, which had to downsize in July.

"It is hard; it's tough that the industry is not at a very healthy level right now, and especially for the last few independents.

"If you're a developer right now and you're owned by a publisher it's hard enough, so imagine what it's like if you're an independent covering all your costs yourself. I don't think it gets easier at any time, but the last two years have been particularly hard."

Ghost Of Sparta will likely be Ready At Dawn's last PSP game, Weersuriya claimed ("We've done the absolute maximum with it"), with the studio now looking to other consoles and potentially its own IP.