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.

I don't thing it'll effect because nintendo does that "seal of quality" thing in every game they put for wii and ds EDIT: just realized the seal of quality was used by nintendo to bring back gamers after the video game crash of 1983

How is that relevant?

I don't think this is as prolific as it may seem, at least with the DS. I have about 30 games for my DS, and my friend, who is very poor, has at least 15 for his. This friend downloads hundreds of illegal ROMs, but not DS games or any system from this or last gen.

Every one of my close friends has a DS, with at least 4-5 games. Of course, Me and my friends are only anecdotal evidence, but I would never have heard of the R4 if it weren't for a few internet stories.

People who pirate games tend to be more tech-savvy than your average casual gamer is. I doubt the Wii has much to worry about. And certainly the DS has less to worry about than the PSP does.

I think it helps hardware and hurts software... Nintendo makes money on Hardware so it is not too terrible(plus they will always sell at least 1 game!!)



wow, that was a Caption Obvious moment for me... : )

After putting two and two together, I'd say the effect is de minimus.

"Piracy" doesn't have anywhere near the effect that companies want the public to believe. Look at music and movies, for example. An artists' entire discography as well as near-perfect quality DVD-rips can be downloaded within mere hours, so if this were so harmful, then all of the major record labels and movie studios should have long ago gone out of business.

Even in the video game industry, look at Xbox Live Arcade and the Wii Virtual Console. Pretty much everyone knows about roms and emulators at this point in time, so no one should be buying anything from either of those services.

Are there people who were going to buy games, downloaded them, and then didn't buy them because they, in effect, already had them? Hell yes, and the same can be said for music and movies, but the effect is grossly exaggerated and is based on pure speculation.

I think it hurts the market overall less than people 1st think. For example, if people are pirating DS games they have more money to spend on Wii games. Everyone I know downloads music which means they can afford to spend more on games because their money isn't disappearing on CDs.

People also pirate a hell of a lot more music/games/films than they could afford to buy so if they've downloaded 20 films, if piracy was impossible they may only have afforded 2. The industry isn't losing the money for all 20 because they would never have been bought in the 1st place. Because the money from those 2 is still theirs they can then spend it on, for example, a couple of games.

People pirate stacks of DS and PSP games but the industry isn't losing much money because they would never have bought those games legally in the 1st place.

I pirate games. But if they are good, I buy them.

I would feel bad about it, but being I have spent probably over $75,000 in the pursuit of gaming over the course of my lifetime, I don’t :p