In the video game industry, we hand out awards for lots of different things. Unfortunately, having your system host the largest number of pirated games is not one of them, and Sony is surely disappointed that the PSP is still at the top of that list. Despite recent efforts to create an unhackable PSP-3000, and the decision to lock out user access to the battery in the PSP Go, the distribution of pirate games remains popular. Users with older model PSP hardware have been able to install custom versions of official firmware, keeping up to date with new game titles even after the launch of the PSP Go. For example, LittleBigPlanet PSP has leaked and is playable on new firmware even before its official launch on November 17.

So is the PSP really the MOST pirated gaming console in the world? According to our very unscientific study, consisting of a survey of major bit torrent tracking sites, it is. Bit Torrent is a P2P client which allows users to share (among other things) pirates ISO backups of video games. Tallying up the numbers, Sony's PSP has a clear lead in the worldwide number of software titles currently available for download through the service. Interestingly, second place falls to the Nintendo Wii, which apparently has its own serious piracy problem (who knew?). Only the Windows PC platform experiences more piracy than the PSP does, but that is to be expected given the ease of copying and running games on the personal computer.

This depressing data got us thinking: what if the PSP had been unhackable from the very beginning? Do these numbers suggest that the PSP games are actually way more popular than their retail sales numbers suggest? Perhaps in an alternate universe where hackers like Dark Alex don't exist, Sony's PSP and its software dominate the handheld gaming market, and even the video game industry in general!