Daily Archives: February 4, 2007

Tastes Like Chicken

(Writing this from Amsterdam, where I’m attending the Casuality Conference.)

It’s going to take forever to digest all the notes I took on this trip to China. I spent the vast majority of my time meeting with developers, participating in an internal MSFT conference, and visiting gaming sites to learn more about them (arcades, internet cafes, etc.)

However, it wasn’t all work. I won’t bore you with my photos of the Forbidden City in Beijing or the famous gardens in Shanghai; if you’re curious about those places, you’ll find a million better photos online. This, however, is one photo you won’t find anywhere else: me making a fool of myself. (Actually, there are a great many such photos… just not set in China.)

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Gray Market

While in Beijing, I visited the “gray market” in order to learn more about video game piracy in China. I’m not sure what I expected… something between an official street market in New York and those guys near Times Square who try to sell you DVD ripoffs (and who pack up their stuff the instant they spot a cop.) I couldn’t have been farther off the mark.

The gray market in Beijing is nothing less than a clean, very commercial, very visible shopping complex. It’s brimming with small stores (one might call them fancy “stalls”), each staffed by several people. The stores have no visible brand, advertising, or sales strategy to differentiate themselves from one another. They don’t need to — there are more than enough customers to go around.

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