Why The Game Industry Is Missing Out In Emerging Markets

One of the major challenges which game industry is facing today is to sell games freely in the emerging countries. In massive population areas such as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil where income is increasing rapidly, demand for the entertainment is on rise and above all demographics are young. There isn’t a single executive in the game industry that is unaware of this fact.

However, these markets represent enormous challenges. They are usually bureaucratic in nature, and difficult to penetrate, always blighted by piracy although that is changing for the better. Now people want to play online and this is driving them to buy original games.

For instance in India, Call of Duty: Black Ops is rated around INR 3100 (80 dollars) i.e.20 dollars more than US markets. The reason is simple , local distributor have limited supply and they know there are buyers for this game , so they can sell games at higher price and make quick money.

Not to forget the fact the 80 dollar is huge chunk of money for an Indian buyer and not everyone can afford it in India. As a result, video game industry is losing their audiences in these countries which shouldn’t be the case. The fact remains that big publishers are not showing any major enthusiasm to promote these games or stop this kind of grey market sales in India.

On the other hand if you take Hollywood for an instance, they are making good money in India because of good marketing, promotions and affordable ticket rates. James Cameron’s: Avatar earned a record INR 10 million ($216,000) for its paid previews across India—the highest for any Hollywood film ever.

The film then created a record by grossing INR 67.5 million ($1.5 million) on opening day itself, making it the biggest Friday opening for any Hollywood film in Indian history. The epic action adventure raked in a whopping INR 220 million ($4.75 million) in its opening weekend, which not only makes it the highest ever weekend take for a Hollywood film, but it beat 2012, Titanic, and Spider-Man 3 combined.

This was all possible in spite of the fact that Avatar had to face tough competition with Indian Bollywood movies.Where as for gaming industry there is no such stiff competition when it comes to local Indian Market.

The good news is that the people have started buying consoles (Thanks to Sony and Microsoft for officially launching Xbox 360 and PS3) in India and now people are aware of this form of entertainment.

The only hurdle being the prices are same everywhere and Indians can't cough up Rs 2500(60 $) for just a game. (PC video games prices have reduced drastically over last few years as compared to console games). Let’s hope, one day the prices will become affordable so that people in India can buy and enjoy digital video games and vice versa gives lot of profit to the Video game Industry.