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Video game consoles are illegal in China. Ironically, the Wii, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are Chinese made. And there is a flourishing PC gaming culture. There has to be a reason for this ban. Turns out, there is.
"Consoles have been banned in China since the year 2000," Lisa Hanson from market researcher Niko Partners tells Kotaku. "The government thought that was the best way to protect Chinese youth from wasting their minds on video games, after a parental outcry." The following year, online gaming exploded, and the market size hit $100 million. So the ban, Hanson says, "didn't stop the 'problem'."
A recent article on Chinese news site Sina.com points out, "In June 2000, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice, forbidding any company or individual to produce and sell electronic game equipment and accessories to China."
Plug'n'play consoles became a legal alternative to the banned home consoles. Nintendo released the iQue Player, a console it developed with software developer Wei Yen, whose California-based company AiLive co-created the Wii MotionPlus. The iQue Player was priced at US$60, and it is not a pure plug'n'play per se. Players can play Nintendo 64 games like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Super Smash Bros. that were specifically ported to the system. To get new games, players go to their local game retailer, where they can download more titles onto a 64MB flash memory card. The cartridge is slotted directly into the controller, which houses the console.
"We have targeted people in developed countries such as Japan, the US and Europe with sophisticated machines," Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said back in 2003. "To reach a wide range of people in China, especially those inland who are not as rich as those in coastal areas, we thought we needed to deliver a cheaper console." And to legally sell a video game console in China, it had to sell something that not only didn't quite look like a video game console and couldn't be pirated to Timbuktu and back. (That's not to say the iQue Player is piracy free!) Since then, Nintendo has used the "iQue" brand in China for its characters and products
contiune reading here
"Consoles have been banned in China since the year 2000," Lisa Hanson from market researcher Niko Partners tells Kotaku. "The government thought that was the best way to protect Chinese youth from wasting their minds on video games, after a parental outcry." The following year, online gaming exploded, and the market size hit $100 million. So the ban, Hanson says, "didn't stop the 'problem'."
A recent article on Chinese news site Sina.com points out, "In June 2000, the Ministry of Culture issued a notice, forbidding any company or individual to produce and sell electronic game equipment and accessories to China."
Plug'n'play consoles became a legal alternative to the banned home consoles. Nintendo released the iQue Player, a console it developed with software developer Wei Yen, whose California-based company AiLive co-created the Wii MotionPlus. The iQue Player was priced at US$60, and it is not a pure plug'n'play per se. Players can play Nintendo 64 games like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Super Smash Bros. that were specifically ported to the system. To get new games, players go to their local game retailer, where they can download more titles onto a 64MB flash memory card. The cartridge is slotted directly into the controller, which houses the console.
"We have targeted people in developed countries such as Japan, the US and Europe with sophisticated machines," Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said back in 2003. "To reach a wide range of people in China, especially those inland who are not as rich as those in coastal areas, we thought we needed to deliver a cheaper console." And to legally sell a video game console in China, it had to sell something that not only didn't quite look like a video game console and couldn't be pirated to Timbuktu and back. (That's not to say the iQue Player is piracy free!) Since then, Nintendo has used the "iQue" brand in China for its characters and products
contiune reading here
