currently on a trip visiting china, japan, taiwan, hong kong and macau... and sure enough i'm paying close attention to video game retailers and making comparisons to the US market.

piracy is, of course, rampant. many of us at vgchartz have thought though the nintendo DS is not susceptible to piracy because of the price of manufacturing cartridges. turns out, this makes piracy extremely easy. here's how it's done:

1. buy a DS.

2. buy an empty cartridge. they come in 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb capacities.

3. buy as many games as you want that's been pirated on CDs (or DVDs or other storage) and copy the games onto the empty cartridge using a PC.

here's how cheap it is: at one store that i spent some time going over their stuff, each DVD capacity of games sets you back by $10HK, or $1.25 US. they actually list how much space each game takes up, and they go from a few dozen Mb's to a few hundred Mb's. so, each DVD comes with tens up to hundreds of games.

they have a deal where you pay $156Hk for 1560 games. that's $20 US for you.

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my longtime friend actually took me to this place. i asked him about PSP. he said, people used to play games on PSP a lot, but recently they have been mainly using it as a media device.

other tidbits: he said he wanted to buy an XBox 360, but his brother told him the PS3 is a better buy. he didn't buy a PS3 anyway, because "there are no pirated PS3 games", whereas the 360 has plenty. i hypothesized that it's a blu-ray issue.

he asked: "so you actually buy DS cartridges? here, you don't buy cartridges even if you have the money. unless it's a game that's got great replay value then maybe you'll buy it."

on the wii: "my home is actually too small to play wii. i don't have enough space to swing the remote."

some number of consumers in china actually consider buying video game consoles on their trips to japan. i know this because i joined a travel tour from shanghai to japan.

various versions of gameboys are still pretty popular. not so much in japan though.

wow, at least NDS's pirating problem isn't half as bad as PSP's.

Yeah, piracy is rampant all over the world.
Except your description of the process is a little off. The cartridges don't actually have memory on them, you insert microsd cards (which come in the sizes you said) and then you upload the program and roms from your PC in order to play it. Basically these cartridges and the software allow you to play NDS roms.

Interesting to note, at my university, almost everyone that carries around a DS uses these (I won't say the name of the "product", because I don't condone piracy).

Biggest issue with these things (and the fact that they aren't actually illegal here) is that people abuse the "grey" area of law. Basically, you are allowed to use these cartridges/mod chips to play "copy" games if you own an original, it's like for safe keeping, that's why piracy continues (at least for Australia). I must admit, it is mighty tempting because I carry around upwards of 10 cartridges when I take my DS out, to have it all in one cartridge would be awesome.

EDIT: Actually IronmanDX, I would say the DS is worse then the PSP. PSP gets more attention because there are less PSP's out there in the world then DS's, so even though the Pirate to Non-pirate ratio would be bigger on the PSP, I would say that more DS's are used for piracy then PSP's.

Also, the PSP is a portable media machine for pirates: music, games, movies can all be downloaded onto a PSP illegally, that'd probably another reason why the PSP piracy gets more attention. Having said that, the cartridge provides the exact same capabilities on the DS (I've seen it) with a few conversions of file types.

Simple fact is, DS is easier to pirate, you don't change the hardware or anything about your console, the cartridge is stand alone, where as the PSP you need to downgrade the firmware and in some cases open the PSP case.  

wow
but they must have a special card reader to be able to read DS cartridges on a PC

@op well we all know what to get when we next visit these countries. Free games.

You would have to police the whole world in order to stamp piracy out. 

Wow , piracy is pretty damn huge in Asia ...

piracy for DS is much cheaper since 1 GB of SD gives you a lot more games than it would if they were PSP games.

You surprised? Shouldn't be at all, welcome to third world countries.

In China I did actually notice a few game shops in the nicer shopping malls, and in Hong Kong too, I actually got a game there, cause it but was quite cheap

Anyway, my brother's driving instructor has a DS with the SD card pirated games, I don't think its cause he can't afford it, cause he has a PS3 basically just for GT 5 P, but it is also the convenience of just having one SD card with all your games on it

That sounds exactly the same as here in the UK. An R4 cart costs around £30 and micro SD cards can be slotted in with around 40 games fitting on a 2gb card. Roms can be downloaded from torrent sites so all people are paying for is the R4 cart plus micro SD cards if they don't already own them. It's not just a Far Eastern or third world thing.

 Nope, they just us use regular micro sd card readers (like what is used for mobile phones and digital camera's).

By the way, I agree with your username.

 Just for an indication of how many games can fit in a 1gb Micro SD.

DS roms range from 16mb to 128mb, but the average game is usually 32mb or 64mb. Basically, you can fit around 14 games (mixed between games of different sizes) in a 1gb. That is a lot of games, considering most people that don't pirate don't even own that many games for their console.