The NES (aka Famicom) is, of course,fondly remembered in Japan. Maybe that's why a 33-year old man from Tochigi prefecture decided he could make a little money on the side by selling pirated NES games.
The man in question sold burned collections of NES roms on CD-Rs via a cell phone-accessible online auction site. Billed as a “Collection of over 2000 Famicom games,” these burned discs sold for anywhere between 60,000 and 74,800 Yen (about $700 to $850) between September of 2009 and September of 2010. Since ROMS are easily found online, the man's only cost was the CD-R. That's a 7480% profit margin.
When you're selling to the kind of person dumb enough to pay hundreds of dollars for NES roms, the money flows, apparently - and the duped customers didn't even get what they paid for. Each of the discs had only 1,135 games on them.
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The unemployed man's name was not released by the police. His only comment about his crime? “I was broke so I did it to make money.”
[Source: Game Business(Japanese)]
Jan 13, 2011
