My brothers friend has a modded Wii with about 200 games on it. Most of the games are shovelware titles (Dora's Adventure, Barbies Pony Ride and etc.), but it does have about 30 or so decent titles. He wants to get rid of it for $100 and I'm tempted to pick it up. The only problem I have is that I have a strict policy of not buying pirated games while the product is still being sold by the manufacturer. On one hand I can buy the pirated Wii and as newer games come out, I can start to build up a physical library or I can ignore the offer and just go on not having a Wii, but also throw away the chance that I could support the developers by buying more of their products down the line.

What do the fine people of VGChartz think of the situation? I'll ultimately make my own choice, but it'll be interesting to see what others would do in similar circumstances.

Buy it and wait 2-3 years to play it :P

Theres a lot more to do with a modded system than pirate- if you wanted to you could back up your legally owned games onto the wii so that you could play them all without changing disks. 

Karma is a real phenomenon. I have lived long enough now to see many of my selfish decisions come back and bite me in the arse later on.  Sow good seeds and reap a good crop and vice versa. You can figure out for yourself if buying and playing a modded system with pirated games is the kind of seed you would like to plant for your future. 

No, don't support douche's who pirate games and don't be a douche who pirates games.

I wouldn't buy it and break your strict policy.

The only time I condone piracy is if it the only way to get it or if the alternative is prohibitively expensive.  For example I don't have too much of a problem with one of my friends a couple of years ago having several PSX roms which he plays on epsxe, because he only uses them for games which were never localised (Xenogears, Tactics Ogre, Chrono Cross, etc).  The alternative, buying an NTSC PSX and importing the games (which I recently did and it is very expensive) would be out of the question for him, therefore I don't have too much of a problem with it.

pretty stupid way of thinking

if its not out where you live you dont play it, simple as that.

If it's soft-modded, just install the official firmware on top of it and call it a day.

If it's not, just buy your games and pretend it's not a modded console. It should still be able to read original games.

I'd say go for it. If you don't have much experience on wii games, that is a good way to find out if you like them.