Release Wii in China and other developing markets/countries

[HoloDust]

wangjingwanjia said:

HoloDust said:

Yeah, Wii is outdated, it was pretty much outdated even when it was released, but I'm not sure if that matters much if other things work in its favour, like, what I believe, would be pretty low price.

I would love to know what is adoption rate of HDTVs in China (maybe wangjingwanjia can chime in with more info on this), so if lot of households still have CRTs, Wii is still very good choice with its great library - specially given that one of the main markets for Wii, pre-teen kids, really don't care much about jaggies and similar stuff (which I can attest to with my kids, as their Wii is still connected to old CRT).

I tried a quick search to find some numbers but found nothing of interest really. But to answer it from my perspective I would say that most people actually have/use HDTV's in level 1, 2 and 3 cities in China. Cities are divided into levels here, level 1 is sort of the big major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guanzhou etc., and level 2 cities are the capitals of each provinces, and level 3 I think is the second most developed cities in those provinces. So in short it is the level of development. Level 1 might be compared to average western level, level 2 somewhat below that but of course developing and level 3 can differ a lot since some level 3 cities can be on the edge of being poor and some are actually even better than level 2, but can not be called level 2 because they are not the capitals.

But my guestimate before was that perhaps 500 million Chinese could be compared to Europe and USA in terms of living standard and salaries. People living in the 3-top levels here. The rest of the people are either poor or just getting by. So I think with people the attach ratio is much lower in terms of percentage of the whole population, but the actual number of people that use HDTV I think should be similar to the west.

A 22-32" HDTV cost around $50-100, so most people can afford them. And I also don't think that CRT is sold anymore, so the people that don't have one are the poor people because they can't afford to buy a new one.

Thank you for your thorough answer - I was also trying to dig up some statistics about HDTV adoption rates, but they seem to be very hard to find, though in the process I have learned much about HDTV buying habits and manufacturers in China (I've also learned that when it comes to 4K TV sets adoption, China is number 1 in the world).

The reason I was wondering about HDTV household penetration was that I've found interesting article from early 2013 that states that from estimated 350-360 million TV sets in US, according to some market analysts, up to 55% are still old CRTs...which is quite a lot, so I was guessing that could be the case with China too.

As I said in previous post, not sure that most of Wii audience cares for its low 480p resolution, but while CRTs are pretty forgiving, it can look quite ugly on HDTVs (unless they have some very good upscalers, like some projectors do).

On the side note, I'm really curious if Wii knockoffs, like JungleTac's Sport Vii, had any success in China, and how much marketing there was for them.