If a game's not released in your country, pirating it has literally no effect on its sales. Capcom doesn't lose money when people pirate Japan-exclusive AA games, seeing as how the US isn't even included in its sales figures. As for the main series games being digital-only, there's no reason to assume pirating foreign games is somehow the cause.
"no effect"? Shortly after our release DGS1 was sold out in some places like play asia / yes asia for a time. You can still get them on Amazon Japan or eBay at their normal price. Seeing as DGS also struggled in Japan to find large enough audience (I posted a link to sales figures for DGS2 in my previous post), buying the Japanese version
does help.
I don't claim that the game was sold out because of us, by the way - it might have been a coincidence.
As for the western releases of the main series being digital-only: I didn't claim that pirating DGS was the reason for that, but people should consider buying/supporting niche games like the Ace Attorney series, because they don't have an audience the size of Mario/Pokemon games. Them being digital-only is an indicator for that. Fans in the west supporting 999 / Virtue's Last Reward was the reason Zero Time Dilemma was even made.
So for Visual Novels, sales have a direct impact. If people pirate them too much, we won't get more of them and the spin-offs (like DGS1&2 / AAI2) won't get localized.
I can't believe people in 2017 still think anti-piracy measures in games accomplish anything other than pissing people off. And again, explain how pirating a foreign game is "detrimental" in any way. If anything, it'd make Capcom realize how much demand there is for the game outside of Japan.
Again: the AP was never able to effectively stop people from pirating the game. It was meant to force people to think about the issue, because any plea to fans to buy the game in the Release Notes or even the boot splash screen would've been largely ignored. And yes, it
did have an effect: we got feedback from many people that our patch made them buy the game, some of them even thanking us - I'm not kidding! There is a world outside GBAtemp
I already explained how importing the game could help DGS and I also claim that this is the best way to let CAPCOM know there is a demand for it in the west. They certainly know who buys the game from
them to sell it to foreigners - if a significant amount goes to play-asia / yes-asia / whatever, they'll know. I'm also pretty sure that Amazon keeps track of its customers, I wouldn't be surprised if they share that information as well.
Like I said, it's your decision what you're going to do. But you thought about it, that's all we wanted you to do. Well, that and supporting the game series we all love, if at all possible.