Back in the SNES era the price of games was like $122 PER GAME. There was NO WAY that I could afford more than maybe one game per year back then. Thank god that I had a friend that got every game released for the SNES and that I could borrow them from him. Thank god for piracy making so that I dont have to pay $200 per game nowadays :P Maybe they should count that as a loss as well, that they sell games cheaper there days than they did min 90's :P

The two most heavily pirated systems were the PS1 and PS2, I would even argue piracy was a big help in establishing the playstation brand. They are also the most successfull. Wii and DS are following that model.

I pirate games and I buy games. The only companies that are losing money on me are rental chains. Games that are worth owning I buy. Just like with music I got sick of being screwed.

Nintendo has always been smart, if you sell consoles at a profit you make money off of pirates.

Don't get me wrong, people selling counterfeit goods is bad for everyone, but the money lost from free information transactions is $0. Sorry Nintendo.

And for those buying second hand you do have a secondary influence on the gaming market. You take a used copy off the market making them harder to come buy and maintaining a higher price for the used copy. This makes the new copy and it s universal availability and stable price more attractive.

For example SSBM routinely sells used for over its $30 player's choice price.


Nintendo is moving in the right direction. Profit from its consoles , must have peripherals, experiences difficult to replicate on computers (touchpad, Wiimote) and the VC.

The VC does provide the ease, immediate satisfaction and reasonable price. Now they just need to put every game ever published on there and allow downloadability to the DS. After that the only excuse to not buying people will have is unwillingness to spend money, and there is nothing you can do about that.

I'm sure that they are aware that piracy will always be there. I'm also sure that they are aware that piracy helps them in a way. All they are trying to do is to limit it's growth.

A decent % of piracy is acceptable, but if it would explode to a very high % it would be bad for both developers and players. So they are just trying to keep the % as low as they can. You can't blame them for this.

Estimates like this are always inflated... by a lot... they usually estimate a direct 1 for 1 loss of profit. (In other words assume every single game that has been pirated would be purchased at full price.)

That's all I want to say.

Well that and pirating is wrong.   

this is worse than "Game XYZ is only using 10% of the PS3's power"

They lost 3 times that much poking around getting production ramped up. Are they diaper-wetting, whiny little bitches or what? It would be different if there was stock on the shelf, but Nintendo leaves itself wide open to piracy by not meeting demand.

when ever a company says they lost x money to piracy i basically say, well its at most 1/3 of that. thats because people dont buy games at the rate that people pirate them.

also, any business decision that causes lost money is stupid. u missed ur chance, get over it. if u want money then go out and make it, stop complaining to us.

Nintendo is full of shit on this one. I mean, how much money do you need to make? Wii made more profit last year than its 2 competitors put together. The only company that should have done this is Sega in late 90's with the Dreamcast as it really did affect their business. And if they didn't bother...Nintendo needs to be quiet here. Nintendo needs a big wag of the finger from Stephen Colbert on this issue.

What is an R4?

although personally i dont like piracy, i also dont like how corporations handle it. both sides suck from my point of view.