Nintendo: Piracy’s ‘heyday’ has passed

Despite a report from games trade body UKIE yesterday claiming that four games are pirated for every one sold, Nintendo has claimed that video games piracy is in decline.

"I think perhaps there’s been a ‘heyday of piracy’ and we’ve now seen a lot of rules come in to stop it," Nintendo UK’s product manager James Honeywell told CVG.

"There’s definitely a step change coming and you see it in various countries around the world. People are aware that video games, music and movies make massive contributions to the economies of countries. They need to make sure they start protecting those things."

UK general manager David Yarnton concurs.

"Recently there’s been some quite significant cases where there were some grey areas as far as IP protection goes," he added. "Recently there have been a couple of rulings with R4s where people have been found guilty and had quite significant sentences against them.

"This now makes a precedent that potentially in the future it won’t be a viable thing for people to do."

Yarnton also went on to explain that the 3DS should be more resistant to piracy then the Wii or DS, both of which have been widely exploited.

"We can’t divulge any technical details on that but needless to say this is probably one of our best pieces of equipment in that respect," he claimed. "There are a lot of things we’ve learnt over time to try and improve the security and protection – not only of our IP but of our third-party publishers’ IP as well."