Protest the increment in price by Milestone interactive for video games

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Aman27deep

Aman27deep

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As you guys know, we were all shocked last year when BF3 and NFS THE RUN were priced at Rs 1,499 in India, but atleast other games like FIFA etc had remained at the older price, ie Rs 999.

Old price - 999
New Price - 1,799

But now all the games are being priced at the higher price @ Rs. 1,799 including FIFA which is a yearly game, should we really spend 1799 on a game we used to get for 999? My answer is no.

Protest the price hike on milestone's official page here - https://www.facebook.com/milestone.interactive\

Together we can do anything!

And keep in mind if we do not protest all the other Indian publishers will also price games much higher, no more GTA/LA noire @ 499, no more max payne 3 at 699.

PROTEST ON THEIR PAGE.
 
Protesting? Why? It's business. If the product is popular, they will increase the prices.

The best way of protesting is to not buy the game. If they see that sales are falling they will automatically reduce the price.

Sucks for console gamers even more though...the price has increased to Rs. 3499 for the PS3 version.
 
Idiots. If they increase the price, then people will just go back to pirating on the PC and hacking their consoles and playing backups. Especially people like me who don't play too many online games. At least on the PC, we can still look forward to Steam sales and sales by other sites like GMG, GG and GoG.
 
Same point here too.
Lower prices was a pretty gud move as it promoted a drop in piracy. Now if they increase it will just increase the piracy rate. They will suffer more along with us.
 
To be very honest India has had some of the best pricing in recent times.

BF3 was 60USD, Crysis 2 60USD etc. international i.e.

Both were very reasonably priced for India. New games on Steam have at the max 10% discount before launch.

Exchange rates have become poorer. I don't think the prices are gonna go down. Its a business after all.

In some time game products will be gone and Gaming as a service will be implemented. EA is certainly going that way.
 
Seriously, no point in comparing USD prices with INR prices. You have to take purchasing power in consideration. $60 is pretty big amount even for a decently paid person like me. It would pay for 2 months of my daily bus fare or 2 months of my Internet bill. The new price point mentioned above Rs. 1700/- is actually my internet bill for one month.
 
quixand said:
To be very honest India has had some of the best pricing in recent times.

In some time game products will be gone and Gaming as a service will be implemented. EA is certainly going that way.
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Depends as @pretttt has mentioned it is pointless actually comparing US prices to their Indian equivalent.

If you want to compare the situations -- we need to have songs priced at ~5/- bucks universally [all Indian artistes, Western music downloadable as many times as we require] movies should be stream-able and iTunes should have been booming unfortunately we do not have this infrastructure [and private players are wary]. So it will not be happening in the near future as I can see it.

Gaming as a service is already going on [freemium model]. But again due to lack of infrastructure / poor infrastructure it is very hard to find someone playing a MMORPG in India. So your second statement is baseless, it will be a gradual shift over to the online retail model this can only happen if internet accessibility improves along with reasonable pricing for uncapped plans [both in speed as well as download terms].

Read this article --> EA preparing to become “100 percent digital company” | Ars Technica.

Just my point of view on the situation. Peace!
 
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I have stopped buying from Indian retail a long time ago. Steam Summer and Winter sales, Midweek and Weekend madness and Daily deals cover pretty much everything. For non steam games like Diablo III, even Indian retail did not have it.
 
ALPHA17 said:
Depends as pretttt has mentioned it is pointless actually comparing US prices to their Indian equivalent.

If you want to compare the situations -- we need to have songs priced at ~5/- bucks universally [all Indian artistes, Western music downloadable as many times as we require] movies should be stream-able and iTunes should have been booming unfortunately we do not have this infrastructure [and private players are wary]. So it will not be happening in the near future as I can see it.

Gaming as a service is already going on [freemium model]. But again due to lack of infrastructure / poor infrastructure it is very hard to find someone playing a MMORPG in India. So your second statement is baseless, it will be a gradual shift over to the online retail model this can only happen if internet accessibility improves along with reasonable pricing for uncapped plans [both in speed as well as download terms].

Read this article --> EA preparing to become “100 percent digital company” | Ars Technica.

Just my point of view on the situation. Peace!
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Both of your arguments are incorrect.

First Steam doesn't care about your purchasing Power It's 60 Dollars around the world. For Everyone. Origin India brought Mass Effect3 and BF3 at "Indian" rates, so be thankful.

Secondly the second statement is not baseless as you have put it. Gaming as a Service is in a very nascent stage, please do not be under the impression that it is in full flow, you have posted EA's article did you read through that?

Why is Diablo3 not in the top d/l list of Ahem sites? GaaS (if I may) is in a nascent stage and won't be limited to MMORPG, you are mistaken if you think that will be the only Gamer base. Lets not assume that infrastructure is the problem and therefore GaaService can't work in India. The world of gaming doesn't run because of what India wants or doesn't want.

EA did get Origin India didn't they? We got some top notch games at very decent "Indian" rates didn't we?

There are more and more Free To Play games coming over each week. You just have to look at Playstation Network to understand that. Why are publishers putting more and more emphasis on Online content? Online passes? It's called business, this is the new way to sell, and there are tons of people around the world ready to spend cash for that.

Development Budgets are getting bigger, games are not going to get any cheaper. More and more games are coming with episode based DLCs (Walking Dead), Rumors: ACIII.

As it has already been put in a post above, you don't like it, don't buy it. Sellers will always find a new way to market it to you.
 
quixand said:
First Steam doesn't care about your purchasing Power It's 60 Dollars around the world. For Everyone.

EA did get Origin India didn't they? We got some top notch games at very decent "Indian" rates didn't we?
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It is not 60$ around the world; in Europe it is available in --> G.B. Pound and EURO. In Russia it has Rouble for sales, every where the prices are different.

Censoring is different as per regions, I think if you have registered yourself as a Indian user in STEAM you will be barred from purchasing Fallout 3 [due to controversial content]. Australia has different issues and censoring.

I am a student okay, you might be earning. I do not think ~1499/- is anywhere cheap for games like BattleField 3 [sure it is a good game but I am a soloist]. On the other hand I play a lot of multi-player on STEAM in RTS games [Fall of the Samurai: Shogun 2 came out for ~699/- later got bumped up to 999/-].

I like physical disc copies and there will be a bunch of orthodox chaps like me who do not have the deep pockets to keep their system on to download ~95GB worth of games [my STEAM library currently].
 
Games are region locked, censored etc. This is not news to me!!

As far as payment options are concerned, I don't know what you are getting at because I've mentioned that Origin lets you pay in Rs. , Steam does not let you pay in Rupees. I'm not sure if steam decreases/increases the price based on Region. Even if it does in EU or Russia, India does not have it so you still end up paying 60USD equivalent.

The point that I wanted to get across was if you want Crysis2 off steam you'd have to pay 60USD. EA obviously has done a good job of bringing some top notch games at very good prices. Milestone have been phenomenal, so far. They have built a very good gamer base by bringing all the AAA at very good prices.

In case you didn't know I was a student not many years ago too. And I didn't do a lot of buying. Please remember that Indian students (most of them) don't work, somebody your age in Japan or US would be be able to afford that.

Moreover, gaming is no more limited to just pre teens or teens anymore is it? More and more people are playing games across all platforms right from Farmville to the most intense simulators. More games are getting bigger budget/ w/ Mature content etc. Students are not the only demographic that Publishers cater to anymore are they?

Sure physical copies will never go away, they are the brick and mortar equivalent. But I do feel that publishers are changing ways games are played so dependencies on Retail sales can be cut out. Digital is probably the way to go.

Deep pockets, no I don't have them either, I do spend a significant chunk of my money on Games, but they do entertain me more than most movies and almost all things on TV. If the game is too expensive, I just wait out. Or refrain from buying anything and everything.
 
One point that we all need to understand is that the reason of price increase is not as much "increase in development cost" as it is "increase in demand of original games", which is very much true especially for India. The reason why I am discounting increase in development cost from the reason of increase in price is because then we would see the price rise everywhere and not just in India. AAA titles in US, for example have always been $50 for PC and $60 for consoles. Why did they not rise in the recent past if the development costs have indeed increased?

In India, the PC games were sold for more than 2K till maybe 7 years ago. Its because of rampant piracy and high costs that companies such as milestone were forced to drop the prices of the games to a more affordable Rs. 999 for a new released PC game. Rockstar took it even further by releasing GTA 4 at Rs. 600. Look at microsoft games. Age of empires 3 still sell for around 1500 after so many years of releasing. It started at 2500. Obviously not many people bought it in India, I know I did not. And I am a convert. I started buying the games a few years ago when this all started.

Now, that the Indian crowd is hooked to these awesome prices and they are buying games, these companies are trying to increase the price, because, now they know that only a small percentage of people who were buying the games in the recent years would stop doing so. We bought BFBC2 for 999 2 years ago and then we bought BF3 for 1500 this year. Case in point, BF3 still sold well. Only a small percentage of gamers did not buy BF3 obviously till it started selling for 1100 on FK. myself included.

So, in my opinion its all demand and supply. When the demand was low, prices were dropped to attract the gamers to start buying original games and not pirate them. Now that they are hooked and Indian gamers are playing online (i.e. demand has increased), they are taking a safe risk of increasing the price. Example is mass effect 3. It sold very well for 1500 when it was launched. If they sell them well at these prices, they wont drop the prices, no matter how much you protest. Once the demand goes down on launch prices and people start buying the games 6 months after they are released at like 600 bucks, they will be forced to reduce the prices. That will take tim, though..... just my 2 paise.....
 
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