Let's not play dumb and keep this a reasonable discussion instead of forgetting about any possible factor beside the one you choose, to win an argument. Console hacking does kill potential software development attraction.
Answer this. How does a console which sold nearly 100 million, have a hard time localizing great titles like xenoblade, the last blade and pandora's tower? Ya see, apart from the mainstream titles like mario kart, nsmb. software did terrible, because of 2 reasons. Inferior multiplatform ports and piracy. The best example of this is the launch zelda game twilight princess sales, compared to skyward sword.
Console hacking is a good business. Here where I live, shops can do it legally. And then the hobbyists start doing it as well. Word spread and potential software buyers go down from thousands to millions.
Whether you are happy or not with this news, for whatever reason, is an entirely different discussion.
That's a pretty silly argument - if you want to be reasonable about a piracy discussion, show some figures.
As of February 2012, there were 3,1 million unique homebrew channel installations, let's assume that there was an additional 1,4 million users who lived under a rock and hardmodded their console instead and we have 4,5
*potential* pirates
(homebrew capacity does not equal piracy, but let's ignore that to give your argument a chance to fly). Meanwhile, the Wii sold
95,85 million units as of march 31st 2012 (99,84 million as of today). Taking this into account, you'd have to assume that over
90 million users without backup launching capabilities bought the console as a paperweight with no intention of buying games for it... that's not reasonable.
The Wii got shoddy ports and was on First Party CPR not because it had piracy problems - it was because it was a generation behind hardware-wise and nobody
wanted to develop for it. Hardware constraints are not hurdles every developer wants to jump over - they limit the freedom of coders. Now, your claims about the games library can also be easily refuted. The Wii had
1221 titles as of November 2011, the DS/i had
1297 titles as of November 2012. These numbers are
still growing and they are not small, so apparently developers didn't mind
all that much.
As for the DS, exact flash cart sales numbers are not something I have, but I can present something else.
As of June 2010, CESA recorded 2,071,006 illegal downloads of Pokemon Platinum, which was the most popular downloaded title until new Pokemon games were released. In the same timeframe,
the game sold 7,06 million copies - this means that there were aprox. 9,131006 active copies of the game at that time, only 22%
(that is, if we assume that all the downloads were working dumps and the pirates did not download the same game several times like they do all the time) of which were pirated
on a system where all you have to do is put a $5-$20 flashcart into your cart slot and you're good to go with no modifications as far as piracy is concerned, and this is an
extreme case - Platinum was literally the no.1 game in downloads, other games didn't even get close to 2 million downloads.
"Touch! Generation - Common Sense Training" was extremely popular and Japan, it's no.11 on the list and it was only downloaded
89,667 times total - that's a
laughable number in comparison.
As for
"Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess", that title was multiplatform - it was released for both the Gamecube and the Wii
, so I'm not
particularily suprised that it sold more although I haven't read any sales figures to support that - this is my assumption.
Both consoles were a massive success for Nintendo, they walked a straight path ahead of the competition in spite of all this
"terrible piracy" and both systems are still supported in some fashion... so no, I guess I can't agree with you, piracy is not a huge, wide-spread problem that you could count
"in the millions" within a single country - if anything
, it's in the millions worldwide and still nowhere near the amount of legitimate console users.