Take into account that 3DS consoles have been on sale over the holidays for between $130-140 and Nintendo surely took a loss.
I highly doubt that Nintendo took any additional losses on hardware based on any individual retailer sales.
Piracy is just as bad on an DS then an PSP. Flash carts are so freaking common now (R4 for one) and DS file size were so small (128mb standard--a few 256mb games) that you can easily download and fit dozen of games on 2GB mSD.
I'd argue this on two points. First, piracy on a PSP doesn't require any special hardware... Depending on the situation, you can hack it with some simple software. Piracy on the DS *requires* dedicated hardware. Thus, inherently, this is "harder".
Secondly, look at the audiences - most younger kids(/their parents) aren't quite as likely to hack their console to play bootleg games. Teenagers is probably a mixed bag and it's probably more likely with adults.
Now, look at who owns DS systems and who owns PSP systems. I've only ever seen one kid in the wild playing a PSP... I see kids playing a DS all the time. While I see older folks playing DS systems a lot, I virtually *only* seen adults playing a PSP.
Obviously, I don't have any hard-core numbers, but my guess if there was some real way to look into it, we'd find piracy worse on the PSP. Even hard-core, anti-piracy folks are known for hacking their PSP to play ROMs.
You have to remember that a lot of people own multiple DS systems, which may skew the tie-ratio down since someone owning both a DS Lite and a DSi (for example) would likely not own multiple copies of the same game
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They're doing it wrong then.
My personal DS tie ratio would be 17.25... and I suspect I'm low on that metric. Then again, I had 4 DSs and traded 3 of them.
That's an interesting point you and TJ brought up. The tie-in ratio for my household (not including my 3DS/3DS titles) is only 24.4:1... Looking at it that way, it's a *lot* lower than I expected mine to be.