FBI says it's now seized "multiple" ROM piracy sites, claims downloads resulted in $170m losses in just three months

It also claimed these websites had seen cumulative downloads of 3.2m in just three months this year - from 28th February and 28th May - resulting "in an estimated loss of $170m".

In other words:

They assumed that every download was by someone who would otherwise have paid over 53 USD for it, which by itself is an absurd delusion.
They described imaginary money that they never had in the first place as "losses", which is a plain lie. You can't lose something that you never had.

Given that both these blatant falsehoods match the propaganda that big media parasite corporations started pushing a few decades ago, it seems pretty clear who the taxpayer-funded FBI is working for.

Reminds me of the math used by cops when they seize drugs to come up with an absurd amount of money to make it look like they're having an impact on the never-ending war on drugs.
- So we've got a kilo of cocaine, but thats gonna be cut to 4 or 5 times its weight probably, so let's call that 5kg. Then lets assume each of those 1000 grams is gonna be broken down into 50 20mg single doses, and lets say those addicts are gonna pay 20 bucks for a single dose. Thats $1000 per gram, time 5kg, we've got ourselves a nice 5million dollar bust here. Call the papers and print it.
RIAA math
Exactly. When I "used to" pirate games (dear me! I would never dare break those little laws now) it was originally because I was way too broke to pay for them. When I had more pay I later bought nearly everything I had pirated and actually played on gog or steam. Since then it's just easier to use steam or GOG than to pirate and scan and install and mess with my firewall and install the crack and diagnose wtf I messed up. Since then I only ever pirated games I'd never ever buy. If you count every game I pirated (sometimes up to three times based on if there were issues, virus scanner pings, lost the file and reinstalled on another drive, etc...) as a lost sale I've potentially caused up to 10k or more in losses over the hundreds of games I've illicitly downloaded. Most of which, again, I downloaded with a bank balance that hovered near 0$.
I mean, it's a Trump appointee. Was there ever any doubt?
there is a reason humble bundle's pay what you want model worked, lol. I bet if humble bundle allows company to get data back for pricing analysis, it would greatly help the indies.
They assumed that every download was by someone who would otherwise have paid over 53 USD for it, which by itself is an absurd delusion.
You're wrong, your presumption assume one single person to download a single file he/she never ear about.
What's most likely, people download ROMs for nostalgia, ie: something they, or their parents, bought them when they were children. So, if we assume someone download their "childhood library" which was already paid, of about ~30 cartridge (admitted the download is the right one, and didn't required multiple download attempt); in the view of the FBI, that single person "stole" 3180 USD he/she paid ~20 years ago.
You're not just supposed to lose the things you bought, you're supposed to be fined (for attempt to play the product you already paid) with price updated to current industry standard.

Losses from lost N64 cartridge sales?

fwiw, modchips for the Switch are commonplace and while I haven't been on any of the listed sites there are plenty with similar sounding names that offer Switch games for download.
- I might have bought more switch games if Nintendo made the switch actually usable by fixing drift on their controllers. I would be playing Nintendo games (I legally own) on my switch instead of emulating them but I can't.

Good old ”download equals a sale” rhetoric still doing a lot of work in these headlines. It’s been decades.

So now the company will have ~100m extra revenue in the next 3 months? Right? Right?

Once more for those in the back.

You.

Will.

Not.

Stop.

Piracy.

I have torrented Mario Kart World one thousand times since it launched and have thus cost Nintendo 70,000 dollars. If I can keep up this pace, Nintendo will be bankrupt within the next year or two.

Fuuuuuck Nintendo. No one hates their fans more than Nintendo.

They are bricking brand new consoles, locking their USB ports to approved hardware, charging for the tech demo that would customarily be free on an $800 device. And that's just this year.

I refused to buy anything Sony due to the dodgy shit from the PS3 days. And that's anything, no TV's or phones. Nothing. If a film is made by Sony I don't go to the cinema to see it.
Microsoft is the same. I have only once bought anything from Microsoft and that was a licence for a windows operating system but I can't even remember which version it was. I know it was from before Windows7. However, never again.
And now Nintendo is on my shit list.

So Nintendo is gonna become richer by that amount in just 3 months?

I love how they always try to pull the same bull that if the only way to obtain something like a ROM was through legal means that these companies would suddenly see a surge of millions more in revenue.

It's just as absurd as the people who say that thoughts and prayers alone will eventually end all school shootings in America.

The government fights this hard over labor's lost wages too, right?

169,999,930. I was never gonna buy that zelda game anyways. So no money was lost.

These loss figures are always fun. Me pirating a game i would NEVER have played otherwise is not a 50€(with todays game prices, 80€) loss for the company. On the other hand there are games that i pirated first because i wasnt sure it would be worth it for me to buy it and then actually bought it when i decided it would be fun to play and wanted to support the company.

I got into the Age of Wonders franchise through a burned disc by our upstairs neighbour as a child. I have bought every game (except planetfall) in that franchise by now. I'd probably never have tried that game without said burned disc
- That's the same way I was introduced to Half Life. Valve has made that money back 1000 fold

How much is that in increased sales due to piracy?

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537

Hey FBI thanks for letting me know about nsw2u cc I had no idea this thing existed...but now I do, so thank you.

seriously though I use the megathread and it has quite literally everything. literally the only good thing to come from reddit.

Do they only target torrent sites or something? Because there's places that have been around for decades that are still up and fine.

TPB is basically immortal. Any instance taken down can be back up in minutes. It's a game of whack-a-mole you can never win.
- Seems that way now, but just imagine AI... Once we ChatGPT our investigations, the pirates will all be caught so super-fast. Give us money, please.
- Yeah, there's dozens of mirrors up at all times
No. The one they are talking about seizing most recently served torrents, but also had direct file listings to ROMs.
Usually just fools from the USA hosting within the USA under their real names and payment information.

Bummer, I used that site a lot back when there were actual Switch games I wanted to play. Guess I'll have to get Metroid Prime 4 elsewhere when the time comes!

the FBI acting like when you were home alone all day and you did jack shit, but your hear your mom pull in the driveway and remember the chores she asked you to do, so you set the trash can on fire to make it look like youre doing something

They are also abducting citizens, just cause.

cc site still works. nsw2u 1 : 0 fbi

I am broke af I would never have bought the game if I didn't get it for free. So they lose nothing if it's from me. Same for TV series and movies.

Yeah... they've been playing tbis broken record for decades now, if.what they say was true, there'd be no muaic industry, no film and tv industry and no game industry by now.

The list of sites:

On top of Nsw2u's closure, the FBI says its investigation - performed with the assistance of the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service in the Netherlands - had additionally resulted in authorisation to seize the domain of "multiple" other sites, including nswdl.com, game-2u.com, bigngame.com, ps4pkg.com, ps4pkg.net, and mgnetu.com.