Nintendo Blames 50% Sales Loss In Europe On Piracy

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You may not have noticed, but Nintendo DS game sales are in a nose dive in Europe. They’ve dropped off 50% in the last quarter. The reason? Nintendo says piracy. Western Europe has long been rated the “worst” place for software piracy and Nintendo has been monitoring such sites that share DS games and name that as the cause for the drop in sales.

Nintendo monitored 10 sites that provide illegal copies of Nintendo DS games. They’ve counted a total of 238 million copies of stolen DS games, just for the month of June 2009. According to Nintendo, calculating the average cost of a Nintendo DS game, that brings the total of lost sales to $11 billion per that month.

If you look at the plummeting sales numbers, it does look bad for Europe. While Europe’s sales dropped 50%, Japan’s only dropped 7% while North America’s dropped 11%. I’m assuming these sales decays are all attributed to the usual Q1 slowdown after the holiday Q4.

To combat piracy, Nintendo is making some hardware changes, like the physically disk-less Nintendo DSi or the upcoming Nintendo 3DS, both of which are (allegedly) harder for pirates to use for their illegal gaming.

As easy as it is for Nintendo to blame piracy for their poor sales, many have pointed out that Nintendo hasn’t released a decent first party game in a while (Pokemon aside), so it could just be that people aren’t interested in anything that Nintendo is pushing at the moment.