Nintendo's war with piracy continues, as it reveals to the Asahi Shimbun that illegal downloads of Nintendo DS software has been the reason for a 45 per cent plummet in European game sales for the platform.The controversial R4 "Magicom" device is named as the main cause of DS piracy. Nintendo said that "trillions of Yen" is lost each year to pirates - this is based on a 2009 study the company conducted that tracked websites offering pirated games. 238 million downloads were recorded from these websites in the study.
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced that he aims to "enhance the ability to combat piracy in Europe through both legal and technological means," by way of developing consoles that could not play such unauthorised software.
The European country with the highest number of pirate game downloads was Italy, followed by Spain and France.