CESA: Portable Piracy Cost Game Industry $41.5 Billion

Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA) says video game piracy for portable consoles like the Nintendo DS and PSP around the world cost the gaming industry at least ¥3.816 trillion ($41.5 billion) between 2004 and 2009. Piracy in Japan alone accounted for ¥954 billion ($10.4 billion) of that amount. In a study conducted with Tokyo University's Baba Lab, CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found. The firms published other details from their investigations of the piracy sites, including its finding that the U.S. has the most servers hosting piracy sites, while China has the second most. China and the U.S. alone make up 60 percent of the total amount of servers hosting piracy sites, according to a translation of CESA's report by Andriasang. Also mentioned in the report, which is available to download (in Japanese) from CESA's site, is that the U.S. accounted for the highest number of accesses to the piracy sites it analyzed. Japan had the second highest number of access, and China had the third highest.