Comment by joshvm

There was also a period when you could very easily (I guess you still can) buy "homebrew" cartridges for the DS, like the R4. Piracy was rampant. I have no idea what the scene is like now, but certainly GB/GBC/GBA/NDS files had no copy protection and were easily distributed online. To make things worse for Nintendo, a big SD card could hold a huge catalogue of games. Since it required zero modding, kids started to ask their parents to get them carts for Christmas and you can still buy them on Amazon. At some point there was a lot of scaremongering that the carts were illegal and that you'd get arrested for owning/buying one. There was a big crackdown and a bunch of countries banned them and fined/jailed distributors, but I don't it ever impacted serious pirates (who could just order them from somewhere like DX).