For those who havent heard, Nintendo is planning on entering the chinese market, and to do so, they are going to try new methods to avoid piracy. China is known for a lot of piracy which has kept of the console makers at arms length from china.
But Nintendo will try and gain an ignored market (other than all the games they pirate) by releasing the iQue.
Its kind of sounds extreme in some ways buy what ever works (though like everything, someone will find some way to hack it)
To curb piracy the console comes with a single memory card to download games which is only usable on the console it was sold with. Titles will include 10 Chinese language versions of past Nintendo games.
The iQue player will cost 498 yuan (60 USD). Each game can be downloaded for only 48 yuan (5.80 USD).
Its cheap yes, but its also old games. And they are pretty much using this as a test in the market, not going full-fledged new generation. And the cheap price may not seem so bad compared to free pirated game than 50 dollar games would be.
On an unrelated matter:
This seems to be wirless GBA links
Special edition cube:
And president of Nintendo giving speech about the industry's growth and change over the years:
