[cesarb]

> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO?

Does it matter? You only need a few people to download and burn the CDs, and sell them in stalls or out of a backpack. From what I remember from that era, physical distribution of warez through burned CDs was very common.

[izacus]

This was also the case for PC games and those made healthy profits in that era too. So blaming piracy seems to be more pushing a certain idea than the actual cause of Dreamcast issues. Especially since the hardware itself sold poorly - if piracy would be to blame, you'd see a lot of unit sales and low game sales. Which did not happen.