[shakes_mcjunkie]

If the chips didn't exist though would they have actually bought every one of those games? Would they have bought the console? I doubt this is information that could actually be gathered and calculated accurately as damages.

[fxtentacle]

There's likely millions of people in a situation like me. If each of them only didn't buy one single $60 game because of the modchip, then that sums up to $60 mio.

I agree that pirated copy != lost sale. But if you play 20+ games and buy 0, I'm pretty sure without modchip it would even out at maybe buy+play 5 games. Plus there's games like the Zelda series that every hardcore fan will play. So for those games, I think it is fair to assume 50% of piracy would have been a lost sale.

And lastly, how do you know that people didn't "buy" their cracked games? When I was traveling Asia, you could buy a modchipped Switch and bootlegged games in the same store. So then you still pay $5 for a new Switch game, it's just that the money goes to some Chinese counterfeit group, not to Nintendo.

[BiteCode_dev]

> There's likely millions of people in a situation like me

Unlikely. Most console users don't even know what modding mean, and among the few that do, fewer even make the step to do it. It's not trivial.

It's very niche, at least in the occidental markets.

[gowld]

> But if you play 20+ games and buy 0, I'm pretty sure without modchip it would even out at maybe buy+play 5 games.

This is absolutely absurd.

Look at the modern internet. "Free" is consumed at rates far more than 4x of "paid equivalents that existed before the free option".

[AussieWog93]

>This is absolutely absurd.

Really?

It sounds pretty much right to me. Consoles have a typical tie ratio of around 8-10 games, and people who mod their systems (who, if anything, would skew towards people who would otherwise buy _more_ games) typically buy zero.

[waffleiron]

But people who mod their system might never have bought the system if that option wasn't available.