You would think Nintendo being a multi-billion dollar company they would be combing the internet for illegally uploaded DS and Wii ROMs and upload false ROMs or some other ways to dissuade people from illegally downloading. Or are they doing more than I know?

lol

how cute

They are doing a lot in Australia, and they've received millions of dollars compensation from people selling "R4" cartridges.

The UK and US are harder to stop piracy in, but they are making progress. They've made it so that DS games are much harder to pirate and they need patching, which puts some people off pirating the games. I don't know about Wii, but I didn't think it had a large pirate base anyway, since it's sold some games with 10/20 million+ sold.

Nintendo has already done plenty to curb piracy. They've branched off from the typical archetypes that pirate games, and created products for people that typically don't have the need, desire or knowledge to pirate games in the first place.

For a few years I voluntarily worked for Nintendo America's Internet Piracy team. I got websites like GBXEmu closed. However after working with the team a few months I was charged with tracking down the suppliers rather then distributors. You see Nintendo goes after the people dumping the roms online rather then those taking the existing roms and circulating them.

After catching some guy in the netherlands I stopped working with Nintendo. It was becoming like a full time job and while I was morally supportive I just decided to stop.

Nintendo does alot to curb piracy but in the end the DS and Wii formats are both pretty easy to pirate. Nintendo is doing alot to catch those responsable for dumping the roms. Recently they hung an Australian out to dry after he dumped NewSuperMarioBros. Not to mention their legal battles to try and stop the sales of R4 chips and Wii mod chips.

In the end I think Nintendo in the past faught piracy the best, rather then creating a conventional format. Do something radically different. Create a format that is highly difficult to pirate. Nintendo has always been protected by its software formats from cartridges to mini-disks!

Also I think its funny to see Sony claiming their poor PSP software sales are due to piracy while I know far more R4 owners then I due PSP pirates. Way more softeware for DS is pirated then PSP yet DS software still sells!

I know of some people who download ROMs through bit torrents. I wonder why Nintendo won't spam bit torrents with fake ROMs to discourage illegal downloading.

Because there are some free programs to complement the torrent managers which block IP's that gives/brings "trash data". So it would be useless.

DS piracy is most likely bigger than PSP piracy in terms of volume of piracy (it really is a very serious problem). But the DS audience has a lot of children (who have parents to buy the games for them or give them allowance money to do so) and non-traditional adult gamers (who can't be arsed to learn how to softmod a Wii and how to obtain Wii ISOs. Especially when it's very easy to brick a Wii when you don't know what you are doing). And these type of gamers are a lot less likely to pirate than teenagers and traditional adult gamers (the PSP's main audience). It's the teens and the traditional adult gamers (who are much more tech savvy and are more motivated to put in the effort to get free stuff) that tend to be doing the piracy on the DS.

Look at it like this.
The DS sold 127,255,831 units
The PSP sold 56,798,930 units

Now let's say the hypothetical piracy rate was 25% on the DS but 50% on the PSP (making PSP users twice as likely to be pirates)

That would mean 31.8m DS flash cards are used to play roms while 28.4m PSPs are modded with CFW to play PSP ISOs.

That would mean that yes, DS piracy is bigger than PSP piracy in volume. But piracy would be a bigger problem proportionately on the PSP still. Since the percentage of PSP users who pirate is double the percentage of DS users who pirate.

Btw you remember all that talk about House of the Dead Overkill's "poor" sales (600k worldwide) being a sign that there's no core audience on the Wii? Think Again. HoTD Overkill was downloaded over 800k times on torrents in 2009. It was in the top 5 of most pirated Wii games for 2009. And while Punch-Out! (another core game) sold decently on the Wii (1m+), it was downloaded like 900k+ times. I bet that No More Heroes, Muramasa, etc. were downloaded more than they were bought. I am telling you, the core gamers are there. It's just that a lot of them are pirating the games. It's the same with the DS. You should have checked out all the buzz within the scene leading up to Ace Attorney Investigations' release. I bet that game has a huge piracy rate. The game sold less than 40k in NA in two weeks. But I bet you it was downloaded by 100k+ DS owners. Easy. And that might be a conservative estimate. I really do believe that game was pirated to hell and back given all the buzz. All the attention seems to be on the PSP's woes and 360 piracy (MW2 and Borderlands banhammers) but there is definitely a shitload of piracy activity on the DS and Wii. NSMB Wii was the most pirated console game (on torrents) in 2009 as well.

They will/is for Australia definitely, they are pirates! Pirates I tell ya!

That's an intersting take on the piracy issue @ love2. Which goes back to my question. Why doesn't Nintendo spam torrents with fake roms?