PS2 Arcades Found In Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

Now for everybody that says that piracy is so aweful, perhaps you see why it is so alive in countries like Brazil. It isn't because they have an inherant desire to steal, it is because they can't afford it. Seriously, a Wii there costs double what it does here, and a game is almost $90US. When your average income is much lower than the US and the price of goods is nearly double what it is in the US, it makes it pretty easy to see why this is happening. You want to stop piracy in lesser developed countries, ESA? Try making your products more affordable to residents of said countries. Or you can just shut up.

A Wii is sold here in Brazil at the equivalent of 785 dollars at a legalized store. Gray market makes it at around 525 dollars. A PS2 console costs 290 dollars.

Computer game makers adopted pricing more adequate to the country's reality. But since console makers did not foresee much potential on Brazilian market, they never planned for good distribution or special pricing policy. For us gamers that want to remain playing straight is much cheaper to import games directly than buy at stores.

As consequence of these acts, I dare say 85% or more of Brazilian consoles run on pirate software. PS3s here run on above 1,000 dollars and since they do not accept pirate software, that would explain a lot of PS3s bad sales record, not only here, but in all developing countries.

I'm a proud owner of a PS3, but I keep on buying my games and selling them some time after I play, since I cannot have all the titles that I want to keep.

Sorry. I did not make clear at my first post. The prices below are valid for the legalized stores.
- U$ 290 for the PS2
- U$ 1,000 + for the PS3
- U$ 1,000 + for the 60 Gb Xbox

Quite a bargain, right?

there are places like this all over south and central america

btw, GTA and Winning Eleven series are the most popular games down there

i'm form chile and thing are not different here
i paid $385 for my Wii (of course i modded it.. games are expensive too) and paid $540 for my 40gb PS3 (i'll mod it asap)
at least pc games are cheap ($30 for the orange box)
but piracy is always an option when the price is double and the income is the half

one last thing.. those ps2 arcades are really common on south america, i live next to a similar arcade were you can rent a xbox360, wii or ps2 for $1 the hour

@moidsch / Dash - Thanks for the info! I haven't had a chance to travel to South America yet (fingers crossed '09) so I wasn't aware that these kinds of arcades existed. Really neat to find out about, though!

its not only in the favelas that its kind of arcades exist, there are places whithin the cities, where you can buy modded consoles, or mod you own, buy pirated software, rent games, rent consoles, or just play there for a while.

its not a gamespot or a blockbuster, but it still looks very official.

there is a lot of piracy but most of these stores dont mess with nintendo. they have official presence in almost all of these countries and they convice the autorities to make raids and stuff once in a while

@temp-
lol, one of the most famous hacks (Trucha Signer) was coded in Chile, actually M$ has more presence than Nintendo, and the Xbox360 was released here in 06, and eventually modded within months

and piracy is really common in here.. and it's all beacuse of the price.. everytime i find a game/movie/record i like at a reasonable price ($40/$30/$20) i buy it

I used to live in Chile (about 13 years). Right now I'm in Europe because I'm studying. But I used to go to "stores" where you pay 100 Chilenean Pesos for 10 minutes (1 USD = 630,75 ...right now). There's only one city where you can find (with luck) original arcade machines and that's in Santiago de Chile, where the games aren't new (they come some years later). Anyways, I used to buy and install modchips on my consoles too. Just because my dad is a doctor and even so, he didn't gain more than 300.000 Chilenean Pesos. I didn't had another choice. I remember when my dad bought Zelda: OoT for the N64, I beat it in less than a month, and my dad paid it with a credit... and after many months, I wasn't paying attention to the game anymore because I pirated a lot of other games which entretained me more.

I remember the first PSX game I beat, it was Megaman X4, in less than 2 hours with everything (of course without using F.A.Q.s, because I didn't had a PC with internet at that time), and only few people in Chile can afford new games to play after some hours. It was the piracy, or play a game (getting bored of it) like 10 times a day, with no replay value.