This is similar to what happened with World of Goo, most of the people who own it (around 80% by some figures) have pirated it. A lot of people who talk about sticking it to The Man just make The Man change his target audience. Most of the people who pirate games just don't want to pay money for them. This creates an environment where you have people clamoring for better games, but unwilling to pay for them. This makes the entire hardcore audience mad because Nintendo won't make them because piracy results in a large amount of revenue lost, but then gets yelled at by people because they won't make non-casual games.
Anti-piracy tech is hard to implement anywhere because even if you have a team of ten thousand people working to make something secure, the number of people who are going to try and crack it is going to be larger.
Example:
If a standard team is fifty people, compare that to the number of DS owners who would like to play Mario for free (say 90%, or about 72 million), now maybe only a tenth of those people have the time and skill necessary to understand what is going on with the code (7.2 million). Now assume that only a tenth of those people have the equipment/funds necessary to work on cracking the code (72,000). Even if you cut this number by ninety percent you still have 720 people who are going to be working to undo the work of fifty. Those are not favorable. The fact that flashcarts are a safe way to pirate software makes it even more attractive to people who want to make money from doing so.
I have a problem with everybody wanting everything they own with a power cable to be a multimedia center. This results in the attempted hacking of everything that you can think of. Nintendo didn't make the DS a multimedia device because they didn't want it to be one. Insisting that everything plays MP3's just makes everything more complicated. People have home computers, laptops, iWhatevers, cellphones, and countless other ways to do that. Cracking software to add functionality may have been the intent, but if you tell people how to do it easily, then most of them will simply use that work to steal stuff.
Probably the worst part is that the flash carts were a fluke. A combination of untraceability along with working almost flawlessly on brand new hardware, a lucky break with getting access to the hardware, and ease of implementation have made flash carts a huge success, to the detriment of Nintendo, and as a result, it's customers. Nintendo has always worked hard to bring good games to the market, but if they can't make money doing that, then they will try something else. This is the same thing that happens with PC games: good games get the crap pirated out of them, so developers are hesitant to spend the resources to make a good game. While a game may make money in spite of pirating, loosing 200,000 in unit sales makes for a Bad Financial Decision.
Games have gotten more expensive because of inflation and because we have demanded that they have more features and better graphics every time. A game like Pokemon is going to cost more to develop because that is the nature of high profile games. Most games, however, don't have a fan base that has been established for over ten years. This leaves Nintendo in the awkward position of either losing a large amount of money on every game they make, or to make games that most people won't pirate. Then we lambaste them because the hardcore audience is neglected. If you had the choice between small-budget games lots of people will buy or big-budget games that some people will buy, others will steal, and then all will complain about, which would you choose?
[/rant][/lecture]
The thing I find most amusing is that the large majority of non-PC pirated games I see people play were made for a Nintendo platform.
