Handheld piracy cost industry £29bn over five years

Piracy on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP formats costs the industry an estimated £28.9 billion ($41.6bn / ¥3.816tn) over five years, according to research by Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association.

The group, which organises the Tokyo Game Show, conducted the research between June 2004 to 2009, in cooperation with Tokyo University's Baba Lab.

Research was based on downloads of the top 20 software titles in Japan across 114 piracy sites, according to a translation by Andriasang. Piracy costs the Japanese market ¥953 billion during the period, and assuming the region accounted for 25 per cent of the global software market, the figure was multiplied by four.

The research noted that peer-to-peer networks were not included in the research, and admitted the actual costs to the market could be much higher.

The CESA said that America had the most pirate servers, followed by China, with the two regions accounting for 60 per cent of all piracy servers. The US was the busiest region for piracy, followed by Japan and then China.

Both the PSP and the DS are known to suffer from very high piracy rates, with multiple methods to play hacked software on both machines easily available online and in retail stores.