And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.
I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.
Either way, they are the gatekeepers to please, so the sentiment of:
>The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games.
does hold true. I heard reports of this especially affecting the PSP as well.
Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).
I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?
Music's "booming" is pretty closely correlated with the uptake of DRM streaming services versus non-DRMed files. Remarkably so, in fact.
It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.
I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.
Which makes sense, things that sell well also are more likely to be pirated. Has it been shown that piracy causes sales to increase? I've looked around but I haven't found anything reliable.
Have any peer reviewed papers supporting your claim in a broad market and timeframe? I find zero.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2132153
Some people want it to be, but it isn't.
There was one (not replicated) study suggesting that people who consumed more music tended to pirate more, but that's a correlation not a causation, and it doesn't follow that they would not have purchased or subscribed to even more music if the piracy option had not been available.