[donatj]

> If publishers like EA and Ubisoft lose faith in the system's ability to protect against piracy, they're less likely to go out of their way to develop for it.

This was part of what killed the Dreamcast. It became very easy to burn CDs of games, rampant piracy, developers dropped out.

[Grazester]

That is not totally true. EA never comitted to the Dreamcast and its death was due to all SEGA's past mistakes that burnt consumer and developers alike. Piracy was never an issue with the Dreamcast in that it didn't hurt the system.

Someone did a pretty in dept analysis of the Dreamcast console and games sales. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hGK2ep3gJI&feature=youtu.be

Sega was strapped for cash and couldn't compete with Sony's hype and deep pockets. The Dreamcast was dead out of the gate unfortunately.

edit:// Seamus Blackley the CTO of the Xbox and person who came up with the idea that Microsoft needed to get into the console market and pushed the company to do it, is quoted as saying "If I had known how powerful Sony and Nintendo were, I would have probably given up on there wouldn't be an Xbox"

That should give you and idea of what the console business is like. Even with Microsoft's deep pockets its a hell of a challenge.

[freeflight]

> This was part of what killed the Dreamcast. It became very easy to burn CDs of games, rampant piracy, developers dropped out.

The original Playstation also could run pirated games rather easily, even without chipping it. All that was needed was an action replay/game shark and using the swapping trick. What made this even more appealing was the fact that the console was region locked and these methods allowed to bypass the region lock.

Which was a pretty big deal back then because it wasn't a given that games got released in every region (no Final Fantasy Tactics for Europe) and if they were then there was often a delay of several months until it ended up in certain regions (Europe). So chipping the Playstation had several advantages for an avid game player.

As a result, there was a very lively schoolyard market of burned PlayStation games being traded, back then I didn't know anybody who didn't have their PlayStation chipped/used swapping trick and didn't have a massive collection of burned games downloaded from the www or straight up copied from rental places.

Did that kill the PlayStation? Nope, it still ended up being one of the most successful consoles. So I'm not sure that console piracy is really that big of a factor for a consoles success or lack of success.