The industry and many people alike have made it a habit to blame P2P, bootleg copies of games, and console hackability for low sales. This is a false dichotomy. They're acting as if this is the only possible factor without even considering any of the others.
The music industry tried the same thing years ago when their sales started to falter, but the real reason was that their product sucked and their business model sucked. People got sick of being force fed band du jour and paying $20/CD for two or three good songs. It also didn't help when they started demonizing their core fan base(that is, people to whom their product would appeal and who might one day buy it) as thieves and pirates. It also didn't help when they started threatening children and the elderly with legal action. If what the music industry was saying was true, then Itunes should have keeled over a long time ago.
It's no different in the gaming industry. Hardcore fans of the Dreamcast always want to blame its demise on hackability, but they conveniently fail to take into account the fact that Sega didn't have the money to sustain it, it was severely lacking in third party support, it never was that popular to begin with especially since it was launched at the height of the PS2's popularity, and that the mere announcement of the PS2 drew away enough attention to kill it overnight, especially in Japan.
The PSP's low software sales can be accounted for using other factors as well, such as the software drought early in its lifespan, the fact that Sony marketed it as a PMP first and a handheld gaming system second, the lack of games that would fit a handheld and instead giving it a bunch of PS2 ports(which took the name PlayStation Portable entirely too far), and the price of the games to begin with($40 for a handheld game has put off a lot of people in the same way that $70+ for N64 games scared a lot of people away from that console).
People also fail to take into account that when to comes to P2P, most people who use it are teenagers and poor college students who don't really have the money to buy it anyway, and when it comes to bootleg copies sold on street corners, this usually happens in third world/poor countries where people definitely don't have the money. They also forget that a large number of digital media on P2P networks has long ago been out of print/discontinued and hence not available for purchase to begin with. Instead, they just count every download as a lost sale.
Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with people downloading digital media for their own personal use, and I think that there are far more important things affecting the world than some otaku fanboy's hard drive filled with Inuyasha episodes or a techno geeks stash of bootleg PC games or some l33t raver's 40GB trance collection. Are wars being fought because of P2P? Are their food shortages because of bootleg CD's? Are their people dying because of bootleg PC games being sold in a market in some third world country?
Didn't think so.
Consoles owned: Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, PSP, DS, PS3
