I like how half the post so far are about it being misleading because  people might not have bought it, got it used, got it cheaper, etc etc. It says in the freaking article that it does not take these into account. Jesus did  you even read it?

I think I may buy some PSP games today =D

the way i read the article, "CESA estimates a loss of...." and then the author states that the number may be "questionable".  CESA should have made better assumptions but they didn't, the released a ridiculous headline generating number that discredits the entire point.

Yes, but it's still misleading. 

CESA's figures the top 20 selling games in Japan were downloaded 23,249,418 and cost the industry 118 billion in damages.

That's pretty bold, it doesn't talk about that being the highest possible amount of damages, it flatly says it is. Even if the article earlier acknowledged that it was a 1:1 ratio of pirated copy to full priced game, it's extremely careless to neglect that at the end like this.

Exactly, instead of being more upfront and transparent, they go for shock factor. It just seems careless, if it's careless on CESA's part, the validity of the study is suspect. Now, if it's just because of the writer of the article, then that has nothing to do with validity. However, I suspect the former, since it seems like the writer acknowledges the shortcomings at first, but that last line almost seems like something more directly from the study.

If I could afford a PSP, I wouldn't buy a game either.

I think the inverse to this is that in a very real sense, ease of piracy has helped PSP as a platform and helped drive it's userbase.  If PSP weren't piratable then sure, some of those games likely would've sold more... but the platform itself also likely would've sold quite a bit less.

I'd say the same applies to a lot of consoles and handhelds since the late 90s, specifically PS1, Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, DS and Wii, and in some regions more than others (hello Europe!).  GBA was heavily pirated, but it was also emulated since basically day one, and there I think you find a significant enough amount of people just played pirated games on their PCs rather than buy a system to hack or stick a card in, to the point where it probably wasn't something that actually drove userbase.

Ok, so I'm with mai, how did they track the total count of downloads? If they are able to track the actual downloads--as opposed to search engine hits for "free/hacked [enter game name] download"--then shouldn't they then have enough information to shutdown sites or press lawsuits on sites or individual downloaders?

Well, for one it's not so simple, but yes, they do have all that information. Actually doing things with that information is not so easy though. For one, they have to go through ISPs to get names to attach to the IP addresses that they surely have. If the ISPs are not compliant, there really aren't any direct laws that can be used to get the names from the ISPs. There are kind of 'rules' for ISPs to follow, but they really don't have to. Still, most ISPs just don't want to deal with it, so they pass the names along.

But now there's another issue, the name attached to an IP isn't necessarily the person who illegally downloaded the content. This was the claim in a recent case that a woman was claiming her children were downloading music, so they shouldn't be dealing with her. 

However, lately there's a firm that has been pursuing downloads of specific movies, namely "The Hurt Locker" and "Far Cry" where the firm would say "Pay a fine of $1500, or go to court". They did this for something like 17,000 downloads of those 2 movies and a few others (with permission from the owners of the of works of course). 

17,000 alone was completely unprecedented, that alone accounts for some 500% increase or so in copyright lawsuits (the $1500 fine is essentially a settlement, and there's some way that they bypass some stuff to make it go smoothly and quickly).

Now imagine this on the 1 million people scale, or 20 millions. It's just unfeasible. It would be doable with about 100 firms pursuing it, and maybe that's the direction the world will take towards piracy eventually, but it's just not possible right now. This is all not even to mention the moral and ethical complications behind everything, but I don't want to go there.

I mentioned the methodology for the figures in the other thread.  They represent worldwide downloads, but only from 25 selected sites.