According to the latest report The Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA), piracy costs the gaming industry over 3.816 trillion yen.
The apparent figure stemmed from an investigation conducted with the cooperation of Tokyo University’s Baba Lab and CESA. This investigation resulted in the above figure with losses from just the PSP and DS between 2004 to 2009.
Researchers got to this astronomical number by checking the download counts from the top 114 piracy sites of several top 20 software titles from 2004 to 2009. They got the worldwide figure by multiplying this number by four with the presumption that Japan holds 25% of the world’s software market.
They also found out that America has the most servers hosting piracy sites with China second. On a related note, America was number one again in terms of number of accesses to piracy sites. Japan was second on this list with China third.
A link to CESA’s press release on the investigation can be found on their website. It’s in Japanese so you may have to use Google translate. To view it click here.
