Taiwan market: Modified Wiis linked to booming sales of LG DVD-Rom drives

Increasing demand for modified Nintendo Wii consoles has resulted in a surprise boom in sales of LG DVD-ROM drives which can be used in creating copies of original game discs, in the Taiwan market. These read-only drives are sold at NT$600-699 (US$18-21), according to Taiwan retail channels.

Although the launch date for the Wii in the Taiwan market is still uncertain, quite a large number of US and Japan version consoles have been privately imported for sale, and this has subsequently caused growing demand for mod chips such as Wiinja, CycloWiz or WiiKey which allow the consoles to run unlicensed game software, the sources pointed out. Such unlicensed game discs sell at NT$150-250, much lower than the NT$1,200-2,000 price for original software discs, the sources indicated.

Due to the demand for copying original game discs for use in modified Wii consoles, either for backup purposes or for sale, LG's LG-8164b, LG-8163b and LG-8162b DVD-ROM drives have become hot sellers because they are the most suitable models to read from an original Wii disc, the sources pointed out. The read disc image can then be burned onto a blank DVD+R/-R discs.

As retail prices of half-height 16x DVD Dual burners have dropped to NT$1,000, such DVD burners and slim-type DVD burners account for 90% of all types of optical disc drives used in desktop and notebook PCs in sales volume, whereas the proportion for DVD-Roms drives is less than 10%, the sources indicated.

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