Nintendo

1 Billion Dollars Worth Pirated DS Games Were Seized

17,000,000 pirated DS games were seized by ELSPA

By Calin Ciabai, Games Editor

11th of April 2008, 17:06 GMT

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The R4 chip, Nintendo DS's greatest enemy

It is a known fact that piracy costs the gaming industry tons of money, and the Nintendo DS portable console is one of the most important targets. The

news we bring you now proves just how much companies lose, as well as the fact that it's virtually impossible to stop it.

This week, ELSPA anti-piracy unit managed to seize a huge amount of Nintendo DS games put onto discs: 85,000 units, to be more specific. Marked "Volume 9 DS games" and never seen before in the UK by ELSPA experts, they had 200 current DS games each. So the value of one disc, should somebody decide to buy all the games from legal retailers, would be around $12,000! And using a bit of math, we get a total sum of around 1 billion US dollars for the entire capture. It is absolutely amazing!

"Piracy costs the games industry dear - just like that of any other entertainment industry," John Hillier, the force for justice who heads up ELSPA's crime unit, said. "Making good and inventive games is an expensive and creative process, with some titles today costing �20m or more to develop. When a pirate sells illegally copied games they undermine the viability of our industry. The worst-case scenario is that pirate activity could cost the jobs of some of the creative talent and that would be a catastrophe."

A catastrophe indeed if we take into consideration the fact that the "Volume 9 DS games" lot was found and it is common sense that 8 similar discs existed in the past (and probably they still do). If all of them had the same value as this one, it would mean that only in the UK the Nintendo DS console had lost around 8 billion dollars. This is the amount needed by developers to create 400 next-gen titles with a budget of $20,000,000 each. Just spend a few seconds thinking about these numbers and you'll be shocked.

TAGS:

Nintendo DS | piracy | 200 games | 1 billion dollars | ELSPA

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: SoNic on 11 Apr 2008, 21:20 GMT

reply to this comment

That's a good example how the industry calculates the "loses" - an aberrant and malicious way:
The 1 billion loss assumes that in UK there are 85000 people that are willing to spend $12000 on DS games and they prefered to hack their DS and run those pirated copyes!!!
Not only that, but it is hinted that since this is volume 9, they can multiply that with 9, like those people would spend each $108000 for those stupid games!

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