You would think that the 64 was never pirated, or it was a very rare thing, but that was absolutely not the case at all. The consoles piracy was damn prolific. People bought used consoles, shackled a bootleg disc drive to it which was basically a knockoff of the 64DD, and would buy a pirated disc with a hundred games preloaded for three or four bucks. Almost all of the consoles sold in East Asia went straight into pirate rigs.
Nintendo needless to say was pretty outraged, because their software sales in that region were basically nothing at all. Worse yet they regularly imported consoles from larger markets to feed their cottage industry. Ironically all of that piracy probably actually buoyed the sales of the hardware. The point I am making is this. Piracy doesn't typically hurt hardware sales. It usually improves them by making them more appealing to low income brackets. Who cannot afford to buy both the hardware, and the software to play on it.
While I am not a proponent of piracy I kind of understand where the people who played in pirate rigs were coming from when it came to the 64. After all there was no low end software market for that console. The cost of the format basically ensured that a game no matter how bad bottomed out at a price point of about fifteen dollars. That was the at cost price whereas the PS2s games had a at cost price as low as a buck or two. Basically if they wanted to play the 64 they had no other choice then to pirate the console.
Anyway if piracy killed the Dreamcast then you really have to explain to me how the 64 survived. If you told me one in four, or one in three of those consoles went into pirate rigs. I would have absolutely no problem seeing that being the case at all.
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