Andre Yoskowitz
21 Apr 2010 18:17
According to Asahi, Nintendo is blaming piracy for the huge 50 percent drop it has seen in DS software sales over the past year in Europe.
The company says it loses "trillions of Yen to piracy each year," with flash carts such as the R4 or the M3 blamed for most of the piracy.
Flash carts are used to run homebrew and other legal features on the Nintendo DS handheld, but also allow for the easy playback of pirated ROMs.
The company says there were about 238 million illegal downloads in 2009 of software, with the main offenders coming from Spain, France and Italy. If the numbers are accurate, Nintendo forecasted $10.7 billion in losses due to the piracy.
In contrast to Europe, the software giant says piracy in the U.S. and Japan were limited, leading to only 11 and 7 percent drops in sales, respectively.