DS Piracy haul finds discs worth £6,000 apiece

Tut, tut. Walton Street market in Hull is the location of the latest raid by Trading Standards to show up a huge quantity of pirated DS games destined for sale to the public.

The haul was massive, turning up discs ELSPA forensic experts have apparently never seen before in the UK. Some 85,000 discs, marked 'Volume 9 DS Games', were seized in total and, it transpired, each held 200 current DS games.

That's about £6,000's worth of games on one disc.

"Piracy costs the games industry dear – just like that of any other entertainment industry," John Hillier, the force for justice who heads up ELSPA's crime unit, said while high-fiving his team (we assume). "Making good and inventive games is an expensive and creative process, with some titles today costing £20m or more to develop."

Well, not DS games, arguably, but we take his point.

"When a pirate sells illegally copied games they undermine the viability of our industry. The worst-case scenario is that pirate activity could cost the jobs of some of the creative talent and that would be a catastrophe."

So there you go: another victory for ELSPA. At least the people arrested should take heart in the fact if Trading Standards hadn't got to them, hundreds of the mums they'd sold them to would have trying to find out how you play the things on their children's DSs once they realised such a disc wouldn't fit in the handheld's cart slots.