

Yet again, the Japanese displaying a clear misunderstanding or willful ignorance of the positive effects of piracy on business and consumption.
If you target piracy, your product becomes harder to get or find, discoverability goes down especially among people that cannot afford to buy it, then you lose even more money since people that could maybe afford only some avanues of paying for your product are now priced out of the products entirely. This happens all the time.
The GameCube is my favorite example. It was hard to pirate games for. Unsurprisingly, the console sold really, really badly in South East Asia. At the same time, PS2 and Xbox both used normal disks, and consequently, since games could be pirated easily, those consoles outsold the GameCube in South East Asia. Nintendo was a victim of their own hubris, their attempt to reduce piracy literally meant they got outsold by their competitors. This is not a unique experience, this continues to happen again and again.
I believe the PS2 hardware was weaker than the GameCube on a technical level, but the Xbox was absolutely way more powerful. Nintendo should have had the home field advantage though, given the popularity of the Nintendo brand. The GameCube should have sold well, especially since it was cheaper than a PS2 or Xbox, but it didn’t.