I'm not surprised at all, PS2 is still the leader of the Brazilian market. However Nintendo will need to do some changes in their business model if they want to succeed in here.

speaking from Colombia, the game market suffers from many aspects but the price is the worst one. tech stuff arrives here with high prices and i really mean HIGH prices, when the 3ds arrived here it was almost 1 million pesos, and that is more or less 550-600 dollars. xbox/wii/ps3 games are between 70-90. and yeah colombia is a third world contry so this sucks . gamers here have to wait for vacations so we can go to the US to buy stuff there (well am speking for my friends and myself).
its sad :(

Can you buy online or do you get hit with high duties and taxes?

sure we cant but its pointless due to taxes and stuff.

we signed the trade agreement with US and aparently the videogame or the whole tech market is the only one that remains the same -_-

Ah I see.  That reminds me, my family and I vacationed in Barbados back in 2007, and I remember going into the equivalent of a Gamestop in the mall in Bridgetown.  First off, they were still selling brand new PS1 games, OLD PS1 games (we're talking Twisted Metal 1 and Star Wars Rebel Assault circa 1995) for the US equivalent of anywhere from $40-$60.  I was actually tempted to pick up a couple as collector's items, but decided it wasn't worth the dough.  Anyway, they had just gotten PS3s in stock, and they were selling them for $600 Barbados, which is the US equivalent of $1,200.

So yeah, I feel your pain buddy.

Just to add to what others have said, the potential market in Brazil is actually pretty large. Videogames are big part of the culture and PS2s were (and still are) very commom, even on lower income households. Before that PS1s were easy to find and the 16bit gen had a lot of presence too. Of course piracy was rampant on PS2 but the prices really are absurd, mostly because of taxes but also from a lack of sensible business models, specially for software given region locking, the cost of media and the fact the software isn't developed specifically for this market.

Current gen consoles are not quite as usual and are certainly much less commom on lower-income residences, but they're still not as rare as you might expect. Piracy is a little bit less of an issue (X360 of course being the go-to console for that), but still most people (from my experience, at least) buy most games used off the internet instead of new. I'm not to sure about the Wii but that might have something to do with my demographic.

All in all, given the absurd prices coupled with the lower median income, I think the current (and historical) sales are a good indicator, specially when you take into account that said income is going up and that the prices could be mitigated from the companies end, and also hopefully trough some pressure on the government if the market starts growing. So grabbing presence on here (and on developing countries in general) can be pretty profitable. In Nintendo's spefic case they still got some of the image from SNES left over, so I'm sure older folks would be interested and reminiscent of some IPs, and it's not hard to sell the Wii to families with kids, so their position is actually not that bad. I could see Mario & Sonic games doing proportionally pretty well too.

They just need to secure the annual Fifa|Madden port from 3DS, and some other minor party games just to keep it alive for 2 years down the road...

Also, 89$ seems about a good and fair price for Latin Countries. The price for electronics in Brazil is simply ridiculous. A minimum wage is about 700 brazillian reais and a 3DS almost costs that. How insane is it.

i didn t even know that Brasil or Argentina did not have the Wii.

shocking!

Does VGChartz track Latin America?

For the most part I thought it was simply a matter of money ...

From my understanding, South American countries tend to have far lower GDP per capita with a far less equitable distribution of income than most of the regions console manufacturers focus on. As a result of this in many of these countries a videogame console costs as much as 2 weeks to 1 month of income for the typical family.

Nintendo has tried something similar in the past with their iQue Player in China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo announced a modified Wii in the future that was re-designed to lower costs and reduce piracy and was going to be released in developing markets for $50 to $75 with games delivered through digital distribution that cost between $5 and $10. Basically, if they removed the DVD player, Gamecube controller ports, SD card slot and USB ports, and put in 32GB of flash memory they could probably sell it for a price many people in the developing world could afford while developing a legitimate market through limiting piracy.