A few more updates from Shanghai, and the first is an update on something you might already have heard hinted at, but didn't realize the extent - there's really quite a lot of Xbox 360 game piracy out here in China.

Supposedly, there's only a limited amount of games available thus far, but we saw "at least one vendor offering Xbox 360 titles such as Hitman: Blood Money for around 30 Chinese yuan ($3.50)." As noted: "This development has occurred after an incident in March 2006, in which hackers managed to flash changes to the BIOS on the Xbox 360's Optical Disc Drive which allowed non-authenticated (copied) games to be played. Further information on the hack surfaced in late May, when other parties appear to have released a public version of the exploit." Baaad news from Microsoft, this is.

Also published - a longer feature looking at the Chinese console outsourcing biz, which is just starting to take off. As noted: "The top companies located in Shanghai can produce art assets, programming elements, and even entire console game projects at a cost significantly below that of Western titles." Games such as Midway Arcade Treasures 3 and the PSP title Street Riders were done entirely in China at a fraction of the cost of Western development. Hopefully this won't mean job losses for Western developers in the long-term.