Lord N said:
Let's look at the Dreamcast first.... 1) When it launched in 1998/1999, the vast majority of people were still on dial-up. This was a time when it could take several hours to download a 3MB mp3 file, and several days to download a Dreamcast game. 2) File sharing apps like Kazaa, Limewire, Emule, Bittorent, etc didn't exist at the time, so in addition to Dreamcast isos taking longer to download, they'd have been harder to find. 3) As is with the price of Blu-Ray recordable drives and Blu-Ray media, CD burners and recordable CDs were rather expensive at that point in time. Most PCs shipped with just a CD-ROM or maybe a DVD-ROM, and an 8X CD burner at that point in time cost in upwards of $300, and the media wasn't cheap either. The Dreamcast itself never sold that well to begin with after launch, and neither the system nor the games had any chance at all once the PS2 was announced, which immediately killed them. The PSP.... 1) You've already mentioned this, but it was marketed more as a multimedia device than it was as a portable gaming device, and that's exactly how people bought it. I wouldn't be surprised if half of all PSP owners are using them as MP3 players and portable video players. 2) It also didn't help that there was a rather large game drought until mid-2006. Even I, a proud PSP owner, have to admit that all the banter on the internet regarding "THE PSP HAS NO GAMES!!!!" was not entirely unfounded, and rather true. 3)It had(and still does, to an extent) too many PS2 ports and other such games that would have been much more appropriate if they were on a home console. It looks to me as though Sony and third parties, in an attempt to exploit the technical specs of the PSP, failed to take into account what kind of games work best with a handheld. 4) The PSP, while having a lot of good games, doesn't have a lot of "must have" titles. It doesn't really have a Brain Age, Nintendogs, Mario Kart, NSMB, Pokemon, etc. 5) The cost of the games themselves. $40 is quite steep when compared to the $30 launch price of most DS games. Yes, people have and are still buying the PSP because it's rather easy to get games without paying for them, but that has no effect because if this weren't the case, then these people wouldn't have bought the PSP at all, much less the games. Having to mess with the hardware isn't a deterrent either as the mod scenes for both the PS2 and the Xbox were rather large and neither of those saw such low software sales. Finally, it's even easier to play games for free on the DS considering that flash carts have been available on Amazon for the bleedin' longest. To sum things up, "piracy" is just a scape goat that the industry, analysts, and other people who follow sales data use to explain poor sales. I'm not denying at all that there are people who were going to buy a game, downloaded them, and then didn't buy them because they, in effect, already had them, but when you look at the big picture, this is de minimus. If the effect on the industry was even the least bit serious, then nearly every record label would be filing for bankruptcy considering that it's possible to download an artist's entire discography in mere hours at the most. Itunes should have also crashed and burned, because why would people buy mp3's when they can use P2P to get them for free?
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Last time I checked the music industry was in big trouble, massive restructuring all around, fusion after fusion, labels vanishing left and right, CD sales dropping like mad, etc.
All this started before iTunes started I might add.
Coincedentaly, DVD sales started dropping just around the time it became economical and simple to burn copies and still haven't recovered.
I think you are vastly underestimating the effects of piracy on developers (of any form of entertainment).
