Found this little tidbit from an article in Time:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647228,00.html

China's Me Generation

There are roughly 300 million adults in China under age 30, a demographic cohort that serves as a bridge between the closed, xenophobic China of the Mao years and the globalized economic powerhouse that it is becoming. Young Chinese are the drivers and chief beneficiaries of the country's current boom: according to a recent survey by Credit Suisse First Boston, the incomes of 20- to 29-year-olds grew 34% in the past three years, by far the biggest of any age group. And because of their self-interested, apolitical pragmatism, they could turn out to be the salvation of the ruling Communist Party — so long as it keeps delivering the economic goods. Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country's communist rulers. "On their wish list," says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, "a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy."

Does nintendo love piracy ?

i can ses it now, new Mario new Mario 3 dolla Mario new Mario 3 dolla.

That is some funny stuff. I have to add that to my sig. And this time, its staying there.

Piracy is ok, because Nintendo makes a decent profit on hardware.

I don't think they'll look at it that way FishyJoe... Can Wii games be pirated, anybody heard? Don't they like spin backwards or something?

 Wii games are all over torrent sites just wainting to be downloaded.

Piracy is a much bigger issue with hardcore users, because they are the 'nerds'. Sorry if I offended anyone. The casual market is much less likely to pirate, simply because most don't have a clue about such things.

Even if Nintendo doesn't enter China officially, gray marketers will still import it if there is demand, which there seems to be plenty of. That works out pretty well for Nintendo too.

As FishyJoe has already pointed out (and other as well throughout this forum):

• Nintendo profits from the sale of every piece of hardware, be it a Wii or a DS
• Sony incurs a loss for each PS3 sold (during launch, the money lost per PS3 sold roughly equated to the cost of buying a Wii at retail)
• As Sony depends on the "printer cartridge" business model to recover losses, Sony relies on software sales to drive profits
• Nintendo would make much more money if their software wasn't that easily pirated (and boy, is it easy to pirate!) but the fact is Nintendo doesn't need to rely on software to make money - they are already making mad money as it is.

Yes, Wii games are all over the torrent sites. You should see what the activity is like on the Chinese torrent sites!

Is Nintendo upset about this? Probably. Is Nintendo losing money because of the piracy? Of course. Is Nintendo going to lose sleep over this? I say nay. Regardless of software losses, they are still growing as a company, recently overtaking even NTT DoCoMo (!) in Japan, making them now the fifth largest company in Japan, and I would venture to say they didn't even take anti-piracy that seriously - because their business model doesn't rely on it. If piracy was such an important matter Nintendo would have attempted to include better deterrents than what they currently have in place - which admittedly, is a joke.

It's like the Apple iPod and iTunes store. Most of the music on iPods is illegal, but the still make a ton of money off the iTunes store and selling iPods.

Sony went the anti-pirate route with their music players and look where that got them.