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Portable piracy costs the games industry £28 billion, investigation finds

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Portable piracy costs the games industry £28 billion, investigation finds
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Japanese industry researcher Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA) has teamed up with Tokyo University's Baba Lab to investigate how much money the video game industry is losing out due to portable piracy.

The number is quite astonishing. Between 2004 and 2009, piracy on just the DS and PSP totalled 3.816 trillion yen, or about £28 billion. Domestically, in Japan, the figure was 954 billion yen.

The figures are based on download counts from the top 114 piracy sites, and include the Japanese versions of the top 20 software titles from 2004 to 2009.

The Japanese figures factored in the ratio of sales for the top 20 games, and the price of games. The figure was then multiplied by four to get the worldwide stat, as Japan is presumed to account for 25 per cent of the world's software market.

Of course, as must always be considered with piracy stories, games pirated are not necessarily sales lost. In a magical world with no piracy and sunshine every day, you can't count on the common software stealer to purchase every game he'd usually torrent.

But it's still a rather massive number. It doesn't help that both handheld systems, the DS and PSP, are remarkably easy to get dodgy games for.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said to be stepping up anti-piracy measures on the 3DS. Sony's Rob Dyer apparently has some magical programming code that'll slow piracy for the first couple of months.

Andriasang
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer