You see, that is true. At the same time, piracy still didn't help them stay afloat. I was actually able to find their games at stores like Wal*Mart, which means there was a demand for them in some form or at least enough to draw the attention of major retailers. Then after flashcards started becoming more common and cheaper, demand started to drop for them. Maybe it was a mix of bad marketing moves on their end, but piracy still didn't help them out.
Piracy may not've helped them out
enough, but it generally is free advertising, with the 'responsible pirates' that enjoy the game enough and have disposable income, buying the game and/or telling their friends about it. This can be true even of pirates in regions where games cost astronomical sums - perhaps they know someone in the US or EU, JP, or AU online that might enjoy the game. They can spread the word.
The issue I think here is that there wasn't much demand for these games. Hardly anyone had heard of the dev, there wasn't much if any advertising, and a lot of people probably saw the cases and thought the game looked uninteresting based on the cover.
DS/PSP may've been a bit of an exception, but the general thing with piracy is that it's usually only 10% or so of the total users of the hardware. Let's be generous and say for DS it was more like 25%, since it was dead-simple to grab a flashcart and go. Maybe 5% of the total userbase knew of Cing, so I'd guess 5% or less of the pirates knew of them. And I imagine maybe 1/3 of that 5% of that 25% were responsible pirates and bought the games after discovering they liked it.
We're getting into very small numbers now. and these are all just numbers I'm pulling out of my butt but they are educated guesses.
Anyway it all boils down to them being a small developer, making games that not that many people will play, that aren't getting properly advertised or really making rounds with popular review/preview sites/blogs/magazines. Maybe they were even the type of games that the end-user would enjoy, but they'd figure their friends wouldn't be into it...
It's not surprising that they flopped but blaming piracy for it is rather short-sighted.
But the point is that you have it in your possession, and because you are keeping a game that you have absolutely no license to have you are draining upon the sales of said game, no matter what point of view you look at it from
Mm... no. Not really. How do you not understand that if a pirate wouldn't have bought it anyway, be it because they don't have the money or because they don't enjoy it, they're not really hurting sales. Let me put it this way - It's called a sale because you buy the game.
If user has money to buy game and does, that's +1 sale. If user cannot or will not buy game because reasons, it's not -1 sale. They're not missing the sale because they wouldn't have got it to begin with. I might download a game, find out it's crap, and delete it. They're not missing my sale because I wouldn't buy it in the first place. I'm not going to make an uninformed decision to buy a game. Let's say... I won't buy games. No one is missing a game sale from me because I pirate everything. I would not buy a single game ever, so they're not missing the sale because I would fundamentally not buy games.
The only case where they might actually be missing a sale is if the pirate has disposable income, enjoys the game thoroughly, but will still not buy the game. That's called the pirate doesn't understand economics or they think the company whose game they're pirating is huge enough that it won't matter.
Your analogy is incorrect btw, you can't make a copy of a sandwich appear out of thin air. Copying is not theft.
As for me, I pirate when the media is a generation or more old. I pirate when I can't afford to buy it. I pirate when I know the company is going to get huge sales regardless of whether I pirate or not.
If it's a game that doesn't sell many units, I might pirate it, but If I enjoy it and I know it won't sell much, I'll buy it at some point. For example, The Atelier Series. It keeps getting localized, I started out by pirating Ayesha.. now I own Ayesha Escha and Shallie Digitally. I'll be buying rorona+, totori, and meruru soon.
Let's say.. An Eminem Album, a pokemon game, Assassin's creed or CoD (not that I'm into all those) I'd be fine with pirating them. Huge sales.
If a company does something stupid, like releasing a game, then releasing a new edition of said game a year or two down the road, and I bought the first one? I'd pirate the crap out of that (I'm looking at you Dark souls II).
If the game's a bug-filled mess, I might buy it when they fix it, but not until then.
small artist/dev/movie maker, that I enjoy? Pretty much a guaranteed buy.
Importing games? lol no. I'm not gonna waste cash to play a game in moon runes that the company thought not enough US people would want. I've got copies of a few gundam games because of this. But that's not true with music.. I've got a few imported Albums from Japan. Not sure why that is.
Haven't bought any japan-only anime or manga yet, though.