Elaugaufein
Member
I'm not going to argue that there was enough physical piracy to have an effect, I've seen enough personal anecdotal evidence to know that it happened and the sales of Flash cards speak for themselves (region locking would have died a long time ago if even half the people who had flash cards would import stuff because it would have been impractical from a business point of view since it'd move all sales to the most served region which would be counterproductive).
Downloads are a terrible way to track piracy for portables though (and to a lesser extent consoles that are late in their life span / past gen), once emulators come out people start downloading entire batches and storing them on external media , so they have whatever they want available when ever. These people download thousands of games in a hit , but likely don't even own the portable device in question and if they did they'd have bought ~10% or less of the games at best.
Though I guess that only applies to absolute numbers, it's still a good way to track relative piracy per region.
I personally have mixed feelings here, I buy my games, even going to the extent of importing an NA 3DS to avoid region locking.
Before Nintendo started doing Digital for most things, the piracy groups would have stuff up and cracked before my express shipping orders would arrive (frequently 0-day or before), that's the kind of thing Nintendo really should have learnt from (DS games unlike consoles or the PSP to a lesser extent , where well within Bandwith for most people).
These groups also make large scale preservation much easier (I'd pretty much bet you can find pretty much every game ever released fairly easily). Even if the platform holders wanted to do this they usually can't (due to expired licensing deals if nothing else or who owns the digital rights now getting lost in company mergers and deaths and not being secured in an age when digital distribution made no sense or only for limited times) and they generally have no real interest in doing so. They prefer remakes and rereleases which bring in more money since they sell at current gen prices.
Even virtual console stuff is half-hearted (usually significantly inferior to open-source emulators) and overpriced. From a current business standards perspective that makes sense, it's important to preserve the psychological value of a game as being above a certain threshold even if it's cost of reproduction is ~0 and it's long since recouped development costs.
