Future generations of consoles made that default behavior, and games are released in multiple continents at the same time with their respective localization. American flagship games are now more appealing and engaging than their Japanese counterparts.
Its not just the money.
It's still fun to hack, by the way, I just have less time to do it.
In fact, if they're smart, they'll be fine with it, because it's a form of 'perfect price discrimination'.
That said, the question is to what extent piracy from other areas bleeds into the higher value markets. Which I believe does happens, ergo 'a crack is a crack is a crack' probably.
It's funny because if the cost of getting a 'hack' of a game literally entails buying a 'CD-ROM' and going through the pain of copying it like in the 'old days', which is a small pain but more than many want to bear, it puts a natural bound on the copying/hacking: it will happen a lot in poor countries, less so in rich countries.
But if a hack is 'discovered once', wherever, and then easily exploited everywhere ... not so good.
I think this is most of the story.
I mean, it's fun to hack, but a lot of people's ideology about a lot of things go out the window as soon as they have a regular job and can afford to buy regular stuff and see these things as pretty much regular products and services.