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For years and years i have wondered WHY Sony, SEGA and Nintendo has had such a hard time with the South American market (Sony is doing rather well in Brazil though). Now i understand why, it´s all about taxes and corruption.

And that´s why Nintendo has decided to pull out from Brazil, due to high taxes and tariffs. It´s sad really, because the people of Brazil love games and Nintendo.

But it´s quite obvious that Nintendo can´t take such a high gamble with the Brazilian market, and just turn the blind eye to the money squeezing government in Brazil.

South America love games. But high taxes and corruption is a no go for Nintendo.

Nintendo simply can´t release games and consoles with the current tax regulations in Brazil. It´s a no can do. So for now, Brazil (and the rest of South America for that matter), just have to do without Nintendo.

It seems like Microsoft are doing rather will in South America though (for some odd reason).

Oh well, i saw some really good comments on “Pat the nes punk´s” video on the topic btw. So i picked out some of the really good comments (imo).

So, check em out 😉

“Don’t be fooled, the problem is that Nintendo never ever cared for Brazil, there’s a huge article here in Portuguese stating how Nintendo many times turned their backs to Brazil

nope, we have problems with sega services since

consoles always being imported, games too, online services with the sega dreamcast were horrendous because of the way internet services are different from the USA, Europe and Japan” – Marcos Taranta

“Nintendo doesnt support the south america market for a couple of reasons:

1- most countries in south america have absurd tax rates…
2- most people only care about soccer games. period.
3- playstation and piracy:
when the playstation1 released over here, piracy was incredible, you could buy games everywhere. so it was cheaper to buy a playstation than a N64 just because of the cheaper games. same story with the playstation 2, until this day you can see people selling ps2 games on the street, (because the system is cheaper and its graphics still holds up). so, when the 7th gen arrived, most people were talking about how amazing was the ps3, but it was expensive and didnt have piracy support until much later. and now people talk about ps4… (few can afford them, but is what they know about gaming)

nintendo was hot until the late 90’s with the support of the famiclones and pirated snes carts, and rised a lot of fanboys who will still buy their products, but we are few… not a real market.

and buying nintendo products is expensive… (the wii is an exception though) so most people are turned off.

the best option for them in south america was the brazilian market because of their population, now official nintendo support in the region is only a dream.

i live in uruguay, a small country between brazil and argentina” – Diego Banega

“They retreated from Brazil (temporally they said) in fact because around here Nintendo is pretty much a niche market, “gamers” here are very prejudiced with Nintendo. For you guys have an idea: for most of the GameCube’s lifespan Nintendo didn’t had official distribution around here, they just returned in 2008 with the Wii phenomenon.

From 2003 to 2008 we had GC and GBA’s thanks to imports and stuff (stuff meaning smuggling). In fact, the original Xbox wasn’t released here either, and the PS2 just came officially with it’s slim version (very late on the console’s lifespan) and besides soccer games we had very few official games for it so piracy was almost mandatory.

Microsoft is strong here (lately) because they already had a huge infrastructure with windows and stuff so for them marketing the xbox here was easy but they don’t exactly dominate the market like Ian hinted; despite Microsoft’s much better infrastructure Sony is the most popular gaming company around here and because of that they can still make money.” – maximuscesar

Source and credit:
Pat the nes punk

Robin “V-Act” Ek
The Gaming Ground