>Will Wright said that Raid on Bungeling Bay sold 20,000 copies for the Commodore 64 in the US, but 800,000 cartridges for the Nintendo Famicom with a comparable installed base in Japan, "because it's a cartridge system [so] there's virtually no piracy".
That's not a demonstration, that can be explained by the difference in hardware penetration, the quality of service provided which was much higher on consoles at the time, pricing, market differences or other factors. You had plenty of counterfeited/bootleg cartridges as well on the famicom.
I'm sure we can find more than one story from the 80s if that's really a thing.
One empirical demonstration of piracy's impact on sales (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#Softwar...>):
>Will Wright said that Raid on Bungeling Bay sold 20,000 copies for the Commodore 64 in the US, but 800,000 cartridges for the Nintendo Famicom with a comparable installed base in Japan, "because it's a cartridge system [so] there's virtually no piracy".