Piracy accounts for dropping DS sales

Measuring the true scale of the impact of software piracy is a tough task, but Nintendo has said that illicit copying of DS titles is to blame for a near 50 per cent drop in DS games sales in Europe over recent months.

Asahi.com quotes the platform holder as stating that trillions of Yen” is lost to pirates each year”, with the controversial R4 device named as the chief offender.

Nintendo’s numbers apparently come from a study in 2009 that tracked websites offering pirated games. Throughout the study Nintendo counted around 238m illegal downloads.

The largest areas of activity were centred in Italy, Spain and France.