Sunday, October 01, 2006

Indians Game enough?



K has a very interesting post on Gaming, Xbox and India. Incidentally, today i was at E-zone(the consumer appliances store by Pantaloons) and there was this demo of X-box out there. Having been a proud owner of the console whilst i was in Tokyo, i went ahead to check out if there were any differences in the "desi" version. So while i was checking out the NFS Most Wanted, i observed a bemused 30 something couple staring at me probably thinking "bacche ke park ka jhoola mein yeh kyon baita hai??!!" and had that "Kids-these-days-look-overgrown" look. Also sadly in the store apart from a few curious kids the demo setup hardly generated any interest. In contrast a Phillips home theater system had a more audience :-(
I wanted to know how much it had sold and Ezone, but couldnt get hold of the sales guy there(there was no one!)
In stark contrast, when the Xbox was released in Japan, it did generate tremendous interest and of course the console sales were disappointing but i remember seeing long queues in front of Game parlours and stores. When i did buy one, my Indian colleagues were offering ideas on what better products could one buy for 35,000 JPY and few japanese friends were like "Sugoi desu ne"!!!(Is it cool or what!!!).

Gaming in India, especially of the console type is still in a very nascent stage compared to US and Japan where it is a much more evolved and mature industry(around $35-50 billion dollars). We are still in the PC games era, even though console gaming is getting a good exposure thanks to places like Reliance Web world, it still is a question of affordability and more importantly acceptance!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Karthik!

Thanks for the link! Your blog is looking great! Looking forward to more stuff!

Raj said...

What you are saying is very true indeed. I am 22 and my interest in gaming often gets me tana's from my parents and peers like "zindagi bhar bachon ki tarah video games hi khelega" and so forth. I have tried many times and now given up explaining to them that the story lines of some of the RPG games like Final Fantasy series and other games are way better and much more mature than the best bollywodd movies . I agree with you guys that the image of gamming does need to change for the industry to rock here.

Raj said...

I agree with you. I am a 22 year old gamer and this gets me a lot of tana's from my parents and peers alike. They often say things like " Abhi take bachon jaise video games khelta hai". I have tried to explain to them a million times that the story lines and plots of some games such as the Final Fantasy series, Metal Gear solid, Resident Evil are much more intriguing and better than most average bollywood flicks