maybe there will be Wii net cafes set up.... with places in to play mutiplayer Wii/sports matches for a small fee, and then maybe some machines set up for online (there will be a much better online system in a year i hope...which is about when they are considering selling to China)

This is huge. Ninty products are very popular there, and the Wii will be just as successful there as anywhere else.

They could also reprice the console to $149US if they wanted - and region lock it, such that China games only work on China consoles. The key to defeating piracy in China is price and distribution. They can also use the government to (try?) and jump on piracy. There has been some success with this in the past.

Piracy is still the challenge of course. There are a few things they can do to try and defeat this - be interesting to see what approach they do use. Downloadable (VC?) titles should be popular there.

 I was j/k

Heh I wonder how Ioi's Chinese sources are? Seems like the world wide totals are going to be a lot harder to figure out statistically with China in the mix. I cant imagine it's easy to get sales data out of china. Well... accurate sales data anyway.

@Bodhesatva

One reason why WoW is so much more popular in China is because they pay so much less to play it. Apparently in China you pay by 4 cents an hour to play WoW instead of $15 a month. Even if you assume addiction level of game playing, you end up with Chinese customers paying less than 1/3 what American or EU customers pay. (Some sources: http://relmstein.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-do-wows-numbers-mean.html , http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34205/102/). You could also argue that more Chinese customers play WoW because they face lower opportunity costs with their time (no console gaming alternatives, poor employment opportunities), or for a myriad of other reasons.

Your WoW logic doesn't transfer over to the Wii though. Nintendo can sell the hardware and make a small profit out of the box to the small percentage of the population that has western levels of income, but it can't expect to make too much profit on software because you can easily find pirated Wii games for under $2.00 (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=13369). I would imagine that Nintendo considers this more as a chance to bring up a generation of Nintendo fans and position itself well for the future than as an opportunity to immediaely turn a profit in China.

I think PPP is fine for comparison, because companies set the price of their hardware. Price discrimination is a time honored tradition for monopolies, and console manufacturers are exactly that - a monopoly. It's similar to how big pharmaceutical companies charge the US the most for their drugs, and sell them cheaper to less wealthy countries. That's why you see different prices in different countries, and in particular why you see much lower prices in China for WoW.

Albionus definitely posted the best analysis (although I couldn't find his figures on the worldfactbook), but nothing that I said was false. WoW is profitable because 4 cents an hour is better than nothing. You can't do that for the Wii (except for Virtual Console games.

I'm pretty sure it was already known the Wii was going into China around the same time as the Olympics and launching with Mario & Sonic at the Olympics to tie it all together.

How about market share? Isn't it important right now to penetrate the market rather than to earn a big profit from the market. If Nintendo can penetrate the China and Korea market with Wii and DS, they have won. Profit can come from rest of the World.

No doubt things are cheaper in China, but still you have to look at the number of handphones and cars sold there. Chinese has been playing Magic the Gathering trading cards for many years too. If they had been video games - starved for 2 decades, I believe they will grab Wii. Nintendo will no doubt sell Wii cheaper just like Nokia and other gadgets company.

I believe China's market has big potential this generation alone, at least for Nintendo.

Well, every three months Nintendo will probably let us know how many Wiis they shipped to China, at least in the last financial report they did write per-region shipments.

In the very worst case in which Nintendo doesn't give out specific information for China, we'll still be able to estimate it by subtracting estimated shipments in other regions from shipment totals.

Yeah Nintendo is in South Korea. But there is even massive piracy in THAT region!

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5485&Itemid=2