The mainstream Indian gaming crowd is too satisfied with what was made 3-4 years ago, and as a whole, it's a big let down. The Counter Strike playing population here is huge though. In spite of the fact that personal computer hardware prices are touching a new low every day, people still consider the fact that buying a separate graphics card is a bad idea and a waste of money. The same goes for software and video games. Another major reason is that most of the public game cafes think buying anything above GeForce series 6 cards would be a horrible investment. An average Indian gamer would buy a stock PC for 550 $ and that's exactly where he plays all his games.
Consoles are kind of a different story. One can easily arrange for a modded machine for a mere 55-65% than the original MRP. To some extent, even the distributors are to be blamed, because comparatively to the prices of the consoles in the American market, local pricing is very, very high. The same goes for console accessories and the games. Also, the demand for accessories isn't something major either. 80% of the gamers in India have no idea that games like Fallout Tactics or MGS 4 or Killzone 2 exist. For them, NFS Underground & other NFS games, Cricket 2007, CS: Source and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne is the crème ‘la crème of the gaming realm. Not that TFT is anything ugly, but with franchises like Command and Conquer, Supreme Commander & Dawn of War around, there's always something more to look at.
Broadband penetration is India isn't mentionable enough. High pricing on various broadband plans, data transfer limits and an average speed of 32 KBPS is not sufficient enough for multiplayer gaming. What makes it even worse is the shitty service every single ISP in India has to offer. And if you walk into a retail store, the video games collection doesn’t really offer much, but the very mainstream games, primarily from the sports and racing genre. The rest are very rare or there is a complete absence of those titles. The fact that most of the consoles are modded and PC games use key gens, online gameplay is marginally low.
The companies are at fault too. There marketing strategies are successful only on paper. There hasn’t been enough publicity for the games or the consoles. And the kind of advertisements and launch events that happened hasn’t been able to amass much success. One major factor why that happened is because they never took the risk of trying and giving the Industry a chance to stand on its own. The so called ‘celebrities’ and actors from movies and page 3 personalities are used when it comes to any kind of a publicity stunt or an ad, which IMO is very lame. They may be popular amongst the masses because the celeb kiss-ass culture in India is roaring, but it’s certainly not going to work for videogames. Instead of mentioning the power of the machine and the qualities of the game that is supposed to be sold, the celebrities are glamorized at these launch events and they just expect people to buy stuff based on that.
As mentioned in one of the posts above, Microsoft has indeed had more promotion activity compared to Sony, and Nintendo is totally dead here. But what Microsoft has done is nothing beyond kissing some celebrity ass and hoping people are going to buy their products based on just that. And those who even buy consoles without a mod chip from the retailers eventually get their machines modded, so as to enable gameplay from pirated discs. Online gameplay on XBL or PSN or any other service is amongst the least of their priorities.
The coverage of video games by the national popular media is very low. There isn’t a proper magazine dedicated to videogames, and for the newspaper columns and news channels, if the Industry is lucky, it’s kind of a once-in-a-year coverage. There aren’t popular gaming events as such, or competitions or expos at all. The mainstream Indian mindset still considers gaming to be a child’s play.
Those titles that are actually available with the retailers are priced at around 50$-60$, and the classic ones are priced at 22$-30$ for consoles and 10$-15$ for the PC. The packing of most of these guys is downright horrible, and the boxes are stuffed with catalogues for other products that the company has to offer. If there ever is a play manual, it’s a 10-20 page thin, photocopied-like toilet-paper thing. Also, the quality of the discs is very inferior.
I order most of my games either online, or I get my friends in the US and Japan to get those titles available for me, ‘cause everything additional in that box is really important to me.
As far as game development is concerned, the colleges here have absolutely no quality job-oriented or skill-polishing majors. As far as game developers and artists are concerned, there are some amazing talented guys who work at companies like Bungie (may be one of you knows Rajeev N?), and Epic, and LucasArts. Many others who work at Indian studios, like Dhruva Interactive, have assisted major companies like EA and some best selling titles like PGR4 in their projects. But something completely native and a commercially successful title is yet to see the sunlight. As patsu mentioned, outsourcing is existent, may be just minimal, because India offers competitive workforce at lower expenditure. And this workforce can really be polished to a great extent with a little effort.
Last and the very important factor is piracy, which hogs the industry here like an incurable disease. And because of weak rules and regulations for curbing piracy, and all the corruption and lack of information amongst law enforcement agencies and the buyers, the problem has only got worse in recent times. South Asia’s biggest piracy market is located at Palika Bazaar, Connaught Place, in the heart of the capital city of India, New Delhi. And this is the major distribution center of pirated games in India. Some pirated do use bugged internet connections and torrents to download and create digital copies, but basically, this particular Bazaar is to be blamed. The nexus of the pirates and the involvement of regional and custom authorities at the international borders armed at Nepal, China, and Bangladesh is just way too strong to be destroyed any time soon. These borders are the ones where most of the hard copies of the pirated games come in. You can get the rarest and brand new PC titles here for as low as 3$. X360 titles are available at around 3$-4$, and PS3 games can be bought at around 5$. ISOs for PSP games are available on DVDs that you can transfer to the memory card. Each DVD contains around 5 titles, and one DVD is priced around 4$-5$. These are the prices at which anyone can buy them. If you happen to be a pirate retailer in the rest of the cities in the country, you will probably order in bulk (numbers touch 900-1000 copies per product in the first season in Tier I cities and towns), and ordering in bulk gives you some catchy bargains. You can get a modded X360 for 250$, a modded PS3 for 460$, a modded PSP for 169$ and a modded PS2 for 110$. All the prices I’ve mentioned are best known to me, and they are all in approximation. Any kind of a fault or error isn’t my responsibility.
Compared to the prices at branded retail outlets here in India, the price the grey market offers has a lot of takers. And this doesn’t end ‘cause no body cares. Those who do, like me, get their games from abroad, and this is the kind of shit that one individual just can’t fix. And that breaks my heart, and totally sucks. The kind of effort and cash that goes into creating and shipping a finished product in the video game industry has null value to the pirates and to most of the Indian gamers. The hand of god needed right now to change this attitude is when developers and the distributors truly commit themselves to ending this suck fest once and for all. India actually has a lot of potential, and Sony, by making the PS3 SDK available to a few developers is kind of a start, but there is a long way to go. If somehow, all this is curbed, profits of the creators are bound to increase.
