Assuming ur right, for every million people, 10 thousand of them are not buying games. 1 game is a loss of 350 thousand dollars per that 10 thousand people, and we all know at least over 1 mill ion people pirate stuff... ts a shitload of money.... they are loosing...
They're not
losing money on pirated games. If they sell enough copies to cover their expenses, they're not losing money. If they don't sell enough, they lose. And if only 10% of that game's players have a bootleg copy (acording to your estimate), that means 90% of the players buy the game instead of copying it, and the production costs are covered several times over. The rest is just lower or higher profit, but profit nonetheless.
Everyone sees piracy as a clean loss for a software company. But tell me: if you couldn't play ROMs, would you really buy all of those games? No. You would buy the games you really want to play, and forget all the rest.
Meaning if you have 100 ROMs, and 5 of them are good, you are not "robbing" Nintendo of 100*$45, you are denying their 5-games-times-$45 sales projection, which they didn't even count on in the first place, because that would be "counting their chickens before they've hatched". And also, many software pirates end up buying the games they like as soon as they lay their hands on some cash.
On the other hand, there are many people who wouldn't even buy the console if they couldn't run ROMs on it. This Nintendo's profit on those people is "one DS". If they couldn't play ROMs on it, Nintendo's profit coming from that individual would be: 0.
I agree that piracy is losing Nintendo money, but not even close to the amounts ignorant sensationalist reporters claim.
The following is not really a spoiler. It's long and not strictly neccessairy, and you should only read it if you're bored:
One more example: the Croatian version of RIAA issued a press statement recently, saying: Piracy in Croatia is rampant, gallopping, runaway, unchecked, extreme and wild. The sales price of all the pirated software, music, movies and other copyrighted material amounts to $"a-lot".
Reason? Every grade schooler in Croatia with a PC has to have a copy of CorelDraw, even though he/she never uses it or even knows how to. (For example.)
And a bootleg copy of Excel. And a pirate copy of Dreamweaver. And Paint Shop Pro.
Saying they would ever buy a legal copy would be stupid.
The only one who would actually buy a legal copy would be that photo studio down the street that uses Photoshop to make school photos pretty. The total profit of the software companies, if somebody actually put a stop to piracy around here, would be $200. Really not worth the trouble.
That, however, didn't stop all the newspapers from stating that "software industry is losing $"a-lot" per year (
) through piracy".
Morons.