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Comment by Kronopath | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that this is in Brazil, which is notorious for having ludicrous import tariffs for technology, including gaming tech. I was there a few years ago and you still saw PS2 games on the shelf at major electronic retailers, because it was still the most affordable console on the market by far. Note that the company producing this, TecToy, is a Brazilian company and thus presumably has an easier time with the tariffs.

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When I interviewed some important people for a personal blog about game development, one guy claimed, half on record, and half off the record, that the import tariffs exist because of TecToy lobbying in first place.

Also, TecToy has very strong ties to the government, for example I saw once the government organize an event to advertise their publicy funded loans for new companies, and everyone that spoke something there had some tie to TecToy and Workers Party at the same time, including some actual TecToy employees.

Having no knowledge of Brazilian politics, I wonder which is the chicken and which is the egg? Does TecToy initially come about because of the tariffs, which it then has an incentive to perpetuate, or is TecToy politically connected from the start?

Seems like a difficult problem to get out of, once you start down the path of protectionism. The tariffs likely slow growth overall, but remove them and you risk killing a homegrown industry if it can't compete.

The tariffs have existed for more than 30 years. Companies like TecToy exist because of the tariff, initially created to encourage the creation of brazilian tech companies. All these years later, and the best the companies can do is to copy foreign technology.

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