http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-20012040-235.html

Time to release that 3DS!

March 2011, just in time for the year end :-)

It largely has to do with the $793 million they lost on the exchange rate with falling western currencies vs. rising Eastern currency. 3DS would be a good idea to come out soon, and also to step up anti-piracy campaigns. Right now lots of revenue is being lost, especially visible in Europe.

Piracy is a major impediment on the handheld industry. Just look at the PSP market, for an example. Otherwise, the handheld market would probably be as big as the home console market, or bigger.

If you believe in the fallacy that every pirated game (or a good majority of them) would have otherwise resulted in a sale if piracy wasn't available.

So the moral of the story is that if you're cheap enough any kind of piracy is justified.

Huge R4 sales in Europe, an increase in illicit downloads, and a 45% decline in DS software sales in 2009, clearly point to piracy ruining the market.

Most people just aren't so cheap to the point where they'd rather do without the goods if piracy is impossible. If you're that adamant then you probably don't really care about the good in the first place (after all, you can do without it) so you wouldn't be looking that hard to pirate it either.

That's why those claims of "billions and billions" lost by the hardware manufacturers due to piracy are severely exaggerated. They're assuming because someone downloads a copy of DQIX that a) they didn't purchase it afterwards, b) would have purchased it new if it wasn't available to d'load in piracy, and c) had no intention of buying it used instead of new (although they consider used games theft as well, that's a different battle). That's certainly not going to be the case with the majority of people. wouldn't apply to most people, a lot of those people who pirate just wouldn't buy otherwise IMO

I think you'll be surprised how many people are weak enough that if piracy was not an alternative they'll buckle down and buy for it instead and just post somewhere about how the stupid greedy industry is robbing them blind but still buying it anyway.

Of course you can argue the price point of an item might matter too but looking at piracy on the IPhone over stuff that sells for $2 seems to suggest no price is too cheap where piracy is not an alternative. Most of the piracy estimates do not assume every piracy is a lost sale. There's some metric they use to decide how many pirated copies equals one real sales loss. Obviously how accurate that is is up to debate, but the amount loss to piracy is not 0% nor is it 100%.