One of the reasons why the developers stopped making games for the PlayStation Portable, was due to the rampant piracy for the handheld. With the UMD disc easy to crack and backed up, Sony learned from that mistake with the PlayStation Vita’s game card.
In an interview on Gamasutra with Scott Rhodes (Sony’s Worldwide Operations), the PlayStation Vita is now using a proprietary format, so pirates will have a hard time in cracking it.
“We needed to have something that would combat piracy from day one, and that’s why the cards that you can purchase for the games are in their own proprietary format. And these days, so many people say the word ‘proprietary’ is a bad word, but it’s something that we felt was completely necessary to make sure that people could not pirate these games. I mean, it’s a custom security solution on each one of these cartridges. That is something that we are confident will protect us from piracy for the long term.” – Scott Rhodes
If what Rhodes said is true, it will be a while before pirates can crack the game card and more importantly the PlayStation Vita, thus we can expect more developers supporting the handheld for the years to come.
