Piracy is still an uphill battle.
Nintendo is working well agaisnt pirates but there is still too many of them to stop them all. China has always been a hotspot for videogame piracy. Even though the largest markets for videogames has always been Japan, North American and Europe, the 1.3 billion or so population of China has gone relatively untapped, almost exclusively in part to the piracy of games, movies and other entertainment media.
In 2003, Nintendo lost around $720 million in sales due to piracy and counterfeit games, even though the number of fakes doubled to 4 million units. This figure is astonishingly well over double of what Nintendo pulled in all of last year, which is $303 million. Piracy not only causes loss, it also prevents new markets from being tapped, most obviously the Chinese market.
