I've been thinkingly closely about Piracy and how rampant it runs on Consoles and Handheld.
Previously there has been very little piracy on Handhelds, however on DS it is fairly rampant especially because of the R4. I don't personally own an R4 but almost everyone I know has one and doesn't buy any games.
Could this show in the low number of SW titles selling for DS in USA compared to the rest of the world?
Same goes for PSP, lots of HW sold, relatively easy to get pirated games and VERY small software sell through when compared to the user base of PSP?
I believe without a shadow of a doubt that the ease of piracy for Playstation vs N64 was one of the deciding factors in the PSX winning that console war, and I almost certainly feel as though it is part of the reason for the PS2's success over Xbox and GameCube which were more complicated to pirate games for.
Now to the current generation - PS3 is not piratable, Xbox 360 is slightly piratable but you have to worry about going online and Wii is quite easy to pirate games for.
How much effect do people think piracy has on the overall position of a console? And do you think there is any effect in the current generation (I don't really think there is much effect on the current generation yet, but moving into the next couple of years this could become a large deciding factor for a large majority of casual gamers looking for a platform to pirate for.
Is PS3 ever going to be piratable? BD's aren't exactly a small capacity.
