Tue, Apr 20, 2010 | 10:45 BST
DS piracy blamed for 50% drop in European software sales
European DS software sales have dropped 50 percent recently thanks to pirates, Nintendo’s claimed.
A report from Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbum (via Kotaku) said that sales for the controversial R4 cartridges were the reason for the decline, with the amount of money lost due to piracy “in the region of trillions of yen”.
The company also said it had discovered that DS software “had been pirated a total 238 million times”.
The results came from a study conducted by Nintendo last year, which had tracked ten websites “based overseas that allowed people to illicitly download game software”, according to the Asahi report, with the biggest targets being Italian, Spanish and French.
Remember the lesson, kids: never pirate games. And stay in school.
6 comments
#1
Swedish Gun
20/04/10, 10:50 am
Pirating games is a slippery slope that ends in extensive drug use.
#2
Bulk Slash
20/04/10, 10:53 am
So it’s got nothing to do with people getting bored with all the shovelware and lack of new, original titles? Even the recent Zelda and Mario & Luigi games felt a bit tired and rehashed, I’m not surprised sales aren’t booming.
#3
dirigiblebill
20/04/10, 10:55 am
From the Kotaku piece: “Apparently the biggest culprits behind the European drop were Italians, Spaniards and Frenchmen.”
I KNEW IT.
#4
mington
20/04/10, 10:59 am
well my girlfriend and her sister both bought DS’s as i could obtain pirate games, and i will pay for my sins in hell, but they’re not big gamers and they wuld never of got them if they had to buy the games.
so thats 200 pounds Nintendo got that they wouldn’t have
This sucks for the developers, but i don’t think Nintendo gives a shit, i bet 50% of DS’s were bought because you can download pirate games
now where did i put the crystal meth
#5
ybfelix
20/04/10, 11:36 am
I think people used R4 since forever, why the sharp 50% decline recently?
#6
Boris Fett
20/04/10, 11:58 am
A shit line-up of games is the reason for the 50% drop in software sales. There were tons of great titles coming out on the machine in its formative years – the last two years have been as dry as a desert for the format though.
That and, ya know, the whole recession thing.