Handheld piracy cost industry £29bn over five years

[wraggster]

Piracy on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP formats costs the industry an estimated £28.9 billion ($41.6bn / ¥3.816tn) over five years, according to research by Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association.

The group, which organises the Tokyo Game Show, conducted the research between June 2004 to 2009, in cooperation with Tokyo University's Baba Lab.

Research was based on downloads of the top 20 software titles in Japan across 114 piracy sites, according to a translation by Andriasang. Piracy costs the Japanese market ¥953 billion during the period, and assuming the region accounted for 25 per cent of the global software market, the figure was multiplied by four.

The research noted that peer-to-peer networks were not included in the research, and admitted the actual costs to the market could be much higher.

The CESA said that America had the most pirate servers, followed by China, with the two regions accounting for 60 per cent of all piracy servers. The US was the busiest region for piracy, followed by Japan and then China.

Both the PSP and the DS are known to suffer from very high piracy rates, with multiple methods to play hacked software on both machines easily available online and in retail stores.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/handheld-piracy-cost-industry-gbp29m-over-five-years

[mike_jmg]

£28.9 billion yeah right

Every download was going to be an actual sale.... sure

Less than one third of all those downloads was going to become an actual purchase probably after price drop or second hand.

[VampDude]

£28.9 billion yeah right

* Production/Development costs
* Marketing

You would be surprised at how much they spend on those things, usually the sales of games can recover much of the spent revenue worldwide... But with the handheld consoles, there is a much lower income from the out, because there is not a wide enough audience of paying customers. Instead the userbase is those of who purchase the consoles for the sole purpose of downloading a game three to four months before it hits their shores, they are selling the console units, but not the gaming units. It would actually be a surprise to know that there are probably almost more PSP consoles sold than actual UMD based PSP games which is where the company loses out. Nintendo, they currently have one of the biggest piracy battles on their hands with the R-?? cards and the availability of cloned cartridges from China, though Nintendo aren't hit as hard as SONY because the DS brand of handheld consoles are based at kids who wouldn't yet be using the PC to download illegally.

Every console is hit by piracy at some point, SONY have it lucky at the moment that their PS3 isn't exposed to what Microsoft and Nintendo face with the Wii and Xbox360... Piracy free makes for a better console, one reason the Wii titles are so poorly made (although worth playing).

[danknugz]

i would like to propose that piracy accounted for 50% or all handheld hardware sales in the last 5 years? if the psp had not been hacked, i would'nt have bought my 3rd one!

[ricosuavez]

asuming that every download is an automatic sale is unrealistic...sony failled to deliver easy apps that the homebrew devs did and the community wanted (pdf,text editer,youtube,radioplayer,custom themes,ect) and when they finally did some it was too little too late...iso's are just an added bonus to custom firmware...
they waited until 6.10 to read playlist and you need a ps3 or pc to create/edit them...even the cheapest mp3 player can create/edit/read playlist on their own...

[rancor01]

Agree with danknugz - I never would have bought a DS if piracy weren't so easy. Same with the Wii. Although I've never purchased a game for either.

[anurag]

reduce the price of original games .Only 10% games are worthy to play and almost all games have same rates.everybody is not rich in this world to purchase games,price should be 5 times less then current price then there will not be any problem to purchase game.
The only reason of piracy is high prices

[PoorKingz]

i would like to propose that piracy accounted for 50% or all handheld hardware sales in the last 5 years? if the psp had not been hacked, i would'nt have bought my 3rd one!

Usually (excluding PSPgo) they sell hardware at a loss which means it cost more money to manufacture the device than they are selling it for. They hope to make up this loss in software sales. So even if they do sell more PSPs it won't result in profit unless they get more software sales.


reduce the price of original games .Only 10% games are worthy to play and almost all games have same rates.everybody is not rich in this world to purchase games,price should be 5 times less then current price then there will not be any problem to purchase game.
The only reason of piracy is high prices

Why shouldn't a PSP game cost $10 less than a PS2 game? They need to cover developing cost.

[fatherofmako]

Yeah you can take that number down a few 1000 dollars based on me alone....every single game ive pirated i never would have purchased in the first place....ever for any reason....the games i want i buy...hence my collection of like 5 ds games and 5 psp games....

[mmochel]

These numbers are always massivly overinflated.
Also they assume that every pirated copy would have been purchased at full new retail price.
I for one only have a small budget for games. So I usually buy themn used several years after their release, if I had to buy new I would be able to buy at most 10 games per year. Now I buy several per month used. Also many of the games that I have downloaded I would never have purchased as they were not worth the money.

[XDelusion]

The government (like Sega did years ago) recently released a document that states plain and clear that Piracy does not hurt the industry.

The fact of the matter is that this is no different than buying used, renting at a video store, or from a library, not to mention copying from either of these sources including friends. Piracy is OLD, and not everyone who uses the internet even understands how to pirate. In fact nearly everyone I work with and knows pays for the games, videos, CD's, and other media they own.

As for the pirates, they are mostly just collectors, and I can assure you, they never had any intention to buy all the stuff the pirated in the first place, nor do they re-sell it. Further more they hardly even use the stuff they've collected, most of their enjoyment comes from the collecting itself.

[Qmark]

As for the pirates, they are mostly just collectors...Hoarders maybe, but definitely not collectors.
I can't even find time to play games I've bought. Downloading every_ds_game_ever.torrent would just be an exercise in silly - nobody is ever going to be able to play a thousand games.