To put Nintendo's problem in perspective, illegal downloads of last year’s popular Pokemon X and Y games have exceeded 527,000 on a popular ROM site, according to publicly available stats. For a thought experiment, imagine if each of those downloads represented a unique user who could have bought the games for $39.99 a pop: That’s a potential (if exaggerated) loss of $21,074,730 in revenue from two games alone.
Yeah, cos everyone who downloaded it is a cheap bastard that would pay this much for a handheld game... I bet more than half of people who downloaded it doesn't even have a 3ds ;D
No, the worse part is this: "As of September 30, 2014, Nintendo reports 45.42 million units have been shipped worldwide ..." and "Pokemon X and Pokemon Y have collectively sold over 12 million copies on 3DS, it's been announced...." (the latter posted on April 7, 2014, so I'd presume the figures are even better than that). So, on the one hand with ~26% of your users buying the game you have actual (not just "potential (if exaggerated)") revenue of $479,880,000. And at the same time, it's some ~1% (probably at least 2-3x that) of your users who pirate?
Yep, let's hammer home those lost sales due to piracy instead of the fact that ~70% of users don't even want the game enough to pirate it for free, so getting them to pay a dime for it.... Not that I'm trying to justify piracy at all. I just think it funny that everyone else isn't being yelled at "why aren't you buying more games"? I mean, I guess it makes sense because the pirates at least display *some* interest in the games, but since the whole basis of the success for the Wii and Android is precisely by growing the market and trying to stir up demand, it really misses the point to focus on Flash Carts and the potential for piracy.
I mean, at a fundamental level, there's no reason a Flash Cart has to be synonymous with piracy.Imagine if tomorrow most third party developers started supporting direct sales of 3DS games to Sky3D users at $1-$5 for eShop quality games? Or if they spent some effort and fixed up (presuming the current homebrew scene needs the help) the free 3ds compilers/libraries and could mostly bypass the development kit costs? Really, Nintendo's major advantages now over smart phones are (1) consistent hardware, (2) better battery life generally, (3) physical buttons, and (4) something of a lock on third party developers. The only thing keeping the last one is the high payout rate based on a high cost of games. So, yea, it's something of a suicide pact to go against the norm or to at all call attention to why a mere ~500,000 in piracy results in so much of a stated monetary loss while piracy in the Android arena is quite different (and goes to show why a stated dollar amount isn't useful). :/
PS - All the above is basically just repeating what I've heard said before (especially noting how the debate skims over the elephant in the room of the largest group simply holding zero interest in the game in question (or I guess being very incompetent, very strict to their own code, very legally inclined, or some combination of the above)) and basically everything Nintendo does to try to make its system(s) unique at the expense of keeping some of the more important (1, 2, and 3) around just undercuts them. But, whatever. :/