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When secondary school student Philip Chan goes down to Mongkok to buy games for his Sony PlayStation, the choice is easy.

 With department stores selling legal copies of games for between $179 and $400, he instead heads for the small shops and stalls hawking pirated goods, where he can buy a CD-Rom with multiple games for a fraction of the price.

 'I'm a student, I can't afford to pay more than $100 a game,' said Mr Chan, 17, whose name has been changed for this story. In all, he owns more than 100 PlayStation games, all of them pirated.

 Like pirated movie video CDs, which spurred the phenomenal local sales of VCD players, the popularity of gaming systems such as the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo64 and Sega Dreamcast in Hong Kong rests largely on the easy availability of cheap pirated game software, either on cartridges or CD-Roms.

 But the Japanese makers of these game consoles are not benefiting. They sell game consoles for relatively little, hoping to recoup their investment by selling the games.

 That differs from the personal computer market, where the vendors rarely sell both hardware and software.

 Because of the small size of Hong Kong's gaming market, coupled with rampant piracy - despite recent clampdowns by police - companies such as Sony, Nintendo and Sega have all but withdrawn from the SAR market.

 Neither Nintendo nor Sega even have an office in Hong Kong.

 As a result, most of the videogame consoles sold in Hong Kong are imported illegally through the grey market via non-authorised distributors in other countries.

 These consoles may lack warranties, but are perfectly operational, usually slightly cheaper, and, most importantly, can play a wider variety of games than authorised imports can.

 The Nintendo64 is sold legally through a number of department stores, such as Sogo, Jusco and Toys 'R' Us in the SAR. Toys 'R' Us sells official versions of Sega's Dreamcast system and games, but volume is small.

 'There are a lot of shops in Hong Kong that sell parallel import Nintendo64, though we don't have a list. It is really hard for us to control the situation,' said Wallace Chow, manager at Mani Toys, Nintendo's official SAR representative.

 And Sega fans could have found the grey market versions of Dreamcast in Wan Chai, Mongkok and Shamshuipo almost immediately after its Japan launch in March.

 Sony, meanwhile, is trying to lessen grey-market imports of its PlayStation by increasing its network of official resellers in Hong Kong.

 PlayStation, despite the fact the games are widely acknowledged to be of lower quality than games made for Dreamcast and Nintendo, continues to sell at a phenomenal pace in Hong Kong.

 That was because there were more games for the PlayStation, one proprietor said, adding that 'no one buys original games'.

 For instance, while there are hundreds of PlayStation games on offer in Mongkok, there are less than 100 available at Toys 'R' Us, and none of the most popular titles - such as Syndicate Wars, Time Crisis II and Dance, Dance Revolution - are available.

 One major reason is that because of the weak network of local resellers, official copies of the games continue to arrive in the SAR many months after their Japan release.

 That irks game-crazy buyers. In addition to being lower-priced, they say the pirated versions arrive faster.

 'No one I know buys from Sogo or any other department stores,' Mr Chan said.

 And as he points out, it is the trendiest games such as Dance, Dance Revolution, which scores players based on how well they follow the dance steps highlighted on the screen, that are really driving the sales of the PlayStation among his group of friends.

 'My girlfriend is really crazy about DDR. She says it gets her to exercise and stay fit,' Mr Chan said.

 Efforts by manufacturers to curb piracy have failed in the face of the SAR's tech-savvy pirates. For instance, Nintendo sells its games on cartridges - unlike the PlayStation, which uses CDs - to prevent duplication.

 However, a product created by a local company called the Doctor64 lets the Nintendo64 read games on CD-Rom. These CDs, with up to 20 Nintendo games on them, are available for about $100.

 Meanwhile, Sony has installed a chip in its Playstation which reads only original software. But parallel importers replace that chip so the PlayStation can play both original and pirated games.

 That means PlayStations sold in shops such as Uny or Duty Free Shoppers have a much smaller menu of games available to them.



Hi-tech pirates outplay vendors in games wars