I'm Chinese. My country has banned TV consoles and games for the past few decades. But gamers here just buy the smuggled consoles from the personal vendors, mostly Japanese edition, then American edition, little European edition.
Yes now there's a free-trade experiment area in Shanghai, so we can import consoles legally. Microsoft has confirmed the copyrighted Xbox One for China will come at October this year. Sony is doing action now, only Nintendo has no messages.
But in my opinion, that probably won't make much contribution to the sales number. For consoles, if we begin to buy copyrighted consoles, we'll also stop buying the smuggled ones. For softwares, the problems seem more serious.
1. There's no ESRB rating mechanism in China, most games such as COD, BattleField, GTA, God of War, won't be adopted by the approving authorities. If we get the consoles with little games, why we should buy that? I will prefer the smuggled ones.
2. Most gamers (but not all) here have been playing pirate softwares for the last few generations. They are used to that and not think it's their fault. This habit is not easy to change for them. Even enough copyrighted and localized games are given, maybe the sales will still be embarrassing.
3. Like other areas in the world, the mobile is more and more popular here, the kids now know iPhone and iPad, but they may not know what a PS4, a Xbox, a WiiU is.
The ice is broken, but the pains formed in decades will need another decades to ease.
