The Computer Entertainment Supplier Association, the organizer of the Tokyo Game Show, has conducted and published a study of the worldwide losses for the handheld gaming industry due to piracy. The research was conducted on the 114 most popular sites where illegal game downloading ensues, in collaboration with Tokyo University's Baba Lab. The top 20 handheld games from 2004 to 2009 were used for the survey.
The figure that resulted from the research is astounding, that is 3.826 trillion yen, around 41.7 billion dollars, were lost because of piracy on the Nintendo DS and on Sony's
PlayStation Portable between 2004 and June 2009. The number was calculated by corroborating the price of the games with the ratio of sales and illegal downloads for Japan and multiplying that by four to get the worldwide figure. It was assumed that the Japanese software market accounted for 25 percent of the total game sales in the world.
Peer-to-peer file-sharing wasn't counted, so the figure could be much higher. Other interesting results show that the two countries that hold most of the servers that make pirated games available are the United States of America and, coming to a close second, China. They represent about 60 percent of the total number of servers in the world. The number of visits on these sites also sees the USA at number one, while Japan follows at number two and China at number three.
This comes after recent declarations from Sony and Nintendo about their handheld consoles being really affected by the piracy that occurs on the platforms. Both systems are quite easy to hack, unfortunately, and Sony and
Nintendo 's efforts to quell this phenomenon have been entirely unsuccessful. The rise of the iPhone and iPod touch as feasible mobile gaming platforms is also not helping the DS and the PSP game sales.
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