While the PSP has had its fair share of success, stateside sales have dropped off significantly over the past few months. Latest NPD figures display a poor showing for Sony’s six-year old handheld, having shifted a meager 65,500 units in April, a mere fraction of the sales its nearest competitor enjoyed.

Sony has placed blame on piracy – in large part – for the PSP’s lackluster performance of late. In fact, the company calls piracy “the biggest problem” plaguing the platform right now, incurring a hit to profitability from all angles, according to SCEA SVP Rob Dyer:

[Piracy has] been the biggest problem, no question about it. It’s become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now. And the fact that the category shrunk inside of retail.

What is being done to combat piracy? Seeing as firmware updates that are hacked left and right have done little to curb the issue, Sony is attempting to combat piracy by slowing it down.

“There’s some code that you can embed that we’ve been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent,” revealed Dyer in a recent interview with Gamasutra.

If this code can fend off pirates from ripping and distributing titles on launch day as intended, we should hopefully see an uptick in software sales. But what about hardware?

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