Russia: last stronghold against Nintendo domination

LOL! I registered just to answer this post =)
I'm from Moscow, Russia. I don't know what's the problem with hardware here (majority of my friends have Wii, none have PS3 and one with XBox360), but there's a huge problem with games shipping.
Most of Wii games in Russia are published by ND, and they suck hard...took them like 5 months to bring GH3 to Russia, and we still don't have GH4 here (except for some reseller offers for like 400$ full band kit).

Russia does have it's own problems, like you said in the article, the same issues that apply in Korea apply here, except that, outside of certain areas, Russia is less developed than Korea (by no means 3rd-world, 2nd world. Most of the cities in Euro-Russia are on par with other European Cities, it's the rest of the country that drags it down)

GeT

You should just sell your Russian Wii if you know English already and import a US Wii and US games. Play-Asia.com sells Japanese & American games

The main problem of Russian Nintendo representation is it's main distibutor - Noviy Disk or ND. They seem like they don't want to spend any resource on proper promotion and establishment and just want to make as much money as they can right from the start. Not the best attitute for a Nintendo distributor.

Games are really getting delayed here, costs 1.5-2x times more, and Wii has one of the highest prices in Europe. Originally it was about 400$, but after a year or so they raised it to 500$+ (official price) justifying it as - if people will decide to buy a Wii, they'll buy it no matter the costs of +-100$. What the hell? WiiFit costs about 130$ (official price).
Invest first and make it affordable and maybe you won't make as much profit at first, but you'll sell consoles and will have a good userbase who will buy software from you.
Similar situation is with the DS.

Probably Russia suffers from the same problem as many countries, high import taxes. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the problem.

Reaver said exactly what i did =) Noviy Disk sucks, no promotion, huge delays and so on. Same with hardware, we got Wii in Russia like 3 months after euro release :/

MidnightScott, 'Russian' Wii is just a regular PAL Wii, so i order games from Europe, price is same as in Russia (yea, game+shipping costs same as just a game in here), but they have em right after the release.

I think this lady, Inna Bukatina, isn't really familiar with the problem. The actual problem isn't in people, it's in management, PR, and advertising. We have XBoX360 ads and promotions all over the TV and shops, and games ship right after Euro-release, and that's why many people prefer XBoX360 (not PS3, it's way to unpopular here) over Wii

This is an interesting article, and I would say that the major problem would be pricing, as said in the article their PC games cost around 8-15 dollars, whereas console games cost the same as they would in EU. You can't just expect people to buy stuff for the same price everywhere in the world. A typical Russian family probably doesn't have as high income as say, a Swedish family.

On the issue of pricing, I wonder if companies would make more money if they released their games for around 10-20€. I know that there are many people like me, who would buy a lot more titles by impulse if they seemed interesting to me, and the price wasn't high. Now I always have to read every single review to be absolutely sure the game is worth it's price, and find where I can buy the game for less than 60€.

GeT and MidnightScott: I am moving from the US to Russia, but wondering about bringing my wii - will it work with TV's there? (assuming I get a voltage converter for it). Any advice?