Indian Gaming Is Being Killed and the Killers Are Not Among Us

If you are keeping up with the news then you might have noticed that Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft Xbox, and Sony Playstation are all coming with their latest and greatest products that will make gaming at refresh rate even in 8K resolution possible. Even the prices of both Sony Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X and S are also very affordable but the real question is if all these launches and advancements are making even a small or insignificant dent in the Indian Gaming scene. The answer is a Jupiter sized NO. Indian gamers suffer from so many problems when they start playing games on PC and consoles that it's almost criminal.

If I made a list of the problems that are affecting the Indian gamer, it would stretch till Pluto but let's start with the most important ones.

• The first major issue facing an average gamer in India starts with the prices. Any gaming laptop, component, console, and anything you can imagine that is required for gaming sells for higher prices in India. Higher than even in the US, which is a first-world country. We covered a story about Nvidia selling the RTX 3000 series cards at way too high of a price in India and even then they had no stocks. It's almost as if the cash coming from India is worth lesser than the US.
• The second issue that an Indian gamer will face after buying either a console or PC component after paying that extra price is getting substandard products and sometimes even worse. Go to any major e-commerce platform like Amazon or Flipkart or go to any forum and they will be filled with comments on how even laptops worth lakhs (a million Indian Rupees) have issues like a faulty webcam, no SSD screw (a major issue in laptops sold in India). To say that big brands are turning the Indian market into a trash dumpster is an understatement cause even trash has some value. Also, Indian service centers are notorious for not having parts for expensive products.

Also Read: Nvidia India Reduced RTX 3000 Series Prices but It’s Too Late Too Late

•  Now, after they have paid a higher price and bought a substandard product to play games then another trouble begins. That trouble is called a lack of servers. Oops, sorry cause lack implies there are any. Take any major game like CoD Warzone, Apex Legends, Fortnite, Hyper Scape, or any game for that matter and none of them have an Indian server. Valorant has been the only game in recent times that has an Indian server. So now that Indian gamer has a system on which they can play games on but can't due to extreme levels of lag and disconnection.
• Even after all of this, let's say you say you will play games with story mode or campaign mode then you will face another major hurdle which is related to currency. Game distribution platforms like Valve's Steam or Epic Games store do regional pricing for all nations all the way from Argentina to Japan and guess which country is the most ignored and often at the mercy of malicious pricing. Again the answer is India. Let's give an example, CoD Black Ops Cold War is priced at $59.99 for the US players which roughly translates to INR 4468.81. Now you would assume that pricing for the Indian market would be a little less since India is still an emerging economy but no. The price of CoD Black Ops Cold War is still the same and since there would be currency exchange involved there will be a fee as well.

Gaming in India is dying and these are the major killers. It's almost like there is a rot that has infected gaming here and no matter how much an Indian gamer shouts and complains, he or she will be ignored. So ignored that PC gaming is already dead. Console gaming is on the rise but it could be a thousandfold more. Is it any wonder why Indian gamers and streamers use android emulators to play mobile games on their way too powerful PC's. The saddest part is that all of these issues can be resolved but won't be because all the parties involved right from the manufacturer to the game publisher have decided that an entire nation that is almost a mini subcontinent and has a population bigger than the US and Europe combined isn't worth any damn effort.