Does it suck to be an Indian gamer?

[echoplxx]

Hi guys,

We're looking for your thoughts on the gaming scene in India. Does India provide a favorable environment for gaming? Do you feel that gaming is too expensive a hobby? Do you struggle with your limited bandwidth to play online multi-player games? We need your input whether it sucks or rocks to be an Indian gamer. Just let your answers fly, the more opinionated your answers are the better.

 

[The Sorcerer]

Limited bandwidth, colourful politics some event managers do (Look at the trend in WCG over the years) during hosting, tournament giveaways. PC gaming was always expensive to begin with.

Back in the 90s, those who were in Kawabonka, Fragshack and Indian pro league always loved to participated for WCG, ESWC and those microsoft nationwide contests that were arranged back them. We all wanted to see atleast 1 Indian winning and going through, but I guess few people like ArunRullEeEz and older ATE members went through international eliminations, maybe once ArunRulezZz was in 10th place but I don't remember all that now.

We have many clans being sponsored unlike before. ATE, Roccat.ROG, DOD....list goes on. COD4 itself has a massive line of clans in India and DOTA has tonnes of lan gamers, so its not that bad as far as lan gamers go. The only good event manager I saw so far is Reinforcement. Even XtremeGaming has some records of not able to put up tournaments few days prior. Once can always blame the sponsors, but I doubt any good sponsors will back out unless they are not satisfied or if someone takes their word back.

 

[d3p]

First thing first, Digital Media Distribution is just another name of pathetic in INDIA.

Next, these ISP doesn't work upto the expectation even if you pay thousands every month.

Third, the interest on gaming in NCR's are more compared to other small cities, because of digital media distributions. That's the reason small cities are more notorious than NCR's with Piracy.

Fourth, there is a saying " WE, Indian's are obsessed about Mileage & also about saving money from every angle that's possible. We are also ready to sacrifice their area of interest, if we are about spend or get paid. "

Now its quite clear that we have several reasons for adopting Piracy. Its not only the case with Games or Some daily used Softwares, its with Movies & Audio Songs also.

O:T- Movies are costing 200 Bucks in Movie theatre, when released & then later Rs.35.00 in CD or DVD's, but we still buy road side DVD's with 4 movies labeled on it with bargained price of 40 bucks & enjoy.

Fifth, whether its PS2, PS3, X-Box or even PC, Original Games doesn't always comes cheap & we specially never spend that much on so called timepass.

Sixth, LAN Parties or BYOC are just in beginning stage only in India.

IMO may be these are the main above reasons, for which i can say

"It sucks to be a Indian Gamer"

 

[Sarath]

Well as far as I can see it is a favourable environment.

Good collection of games, fast releases, stable internet connections [4mbps line by airtel used for online Dota and PS3's PSN], quality gaming cafe's like Zapak, Gamedrome etc, Latest hardware releases. Our country is not effected by war, natural calamity or great economic depression. A huge young population which is relatively better than the other nations in comparison.

On the downside, gaming is a very expensive hobby both monetary and health wise. Hence the adoption is restricted to the well to do families. For industries gaming scene in India doesn't look as viable as other nations and hence we don't have huge gaming fests etc which needs hefty sponsoring.
Piracy is another factor that is commonplace but that has less to do with our exclusive interests esp when you look up dubious game files on a swedish server with peers from nations including portugal, uk, etc etc means we are not alone.

I don't see any technical difficulties in gaming; it is on par with other nations on this regard. It has more to do with our social and economic state as of now.

It certainly rocks to be an Indian gamer.

 

[justme101]

Well i have an unlimited bandwidth connection but that just has speed good enough for browsing the web because downloading big files around 700 MBs takes around 4-5 Hrs. and i don't believe that kind of speed is good for online gaming. Now the plans with higher speeds cost too much (and i have seen it on all ISPs). May be it's not much for many people but many students who constitute a majority of gamers in India do not tend to pay big amounts for high speeds. There should be better quality broadband connections at cheaper rates.

Nor there are many events throughout the country which encourage gamers to test their skills and are hence restricted to playing with friends.

As Sarath metioned above it is an expensive hobby and is mostly restricted by the economic state.

 

[Soumik99]

What I have seen is little kids that beg for money on the railway stations, spend that money to play games at the nearby cafe. And you wouldn't believe how much skilled they are in CS... I once decided to have a round of MW deathmatch along with three other buddies of mine and one of these mentioned kids(they are probably 10-12, not more), and he ranked first! This really shows the impact of gaming in India in general.
Then again, the same copies of CS and COD-MW in the cafes are but pirated... so when it comes to playing the game, we rock, but in resources this country sucks. The politics, the system sucks, not us. Gaming is still considered as just a leisure activity to the point you shouldn't spend 999 bucks at all... it is much wiser to pirate it(personal experience as often being mocked by friends). A lot of things need to change and it is currently inhibited by the political as well as the narrow social mindset of the people(the majority of course).

 

[psiknight99]

Karl Marx gave the theory of dialectical materialism, which summed up in simple words says that a Base is required for the Superstructure to be built. The base in this context is affluence, once this requirement is met gaming will boom, as one of the members above rightly pointed out that we have a plethora of young people, so nothing should stop us. Gaming certainly isn't that great but we still have clans and the likes. A lot of guys in college game, I mean everybody in my college loves gaming but its a really hard decision to give up everything else and take up this profession.
I wouldn't say it sucks, but it ain't that great either.

 

[Piyush]

I think a poll will make the process faster

 

[tkin]

The bandwidth and server latency are pathetic in India, plus most games today don't come with dedicated servers, and companies don't bother setting up dedicated servers in india, maybe in singapore, so at the end of the day, our condition is epic pathetic.

 

[TheGibMaker]

Yes, it definately sucks to be a gamer in tier II and lower cities, since it takes a lot of labour and time to find a shop/s that sell games other than "Vamipre killer" and the likes. The atmosphere is cheap, and piratefags flourish, and even people who genuinely want to buy original ("overpriced," acc. to piratefags) games have to travel to Delhi and the metros. Ask me, i live in Meerut. It is a constant pain to go to nehru place each time a new playable title appears.

 

[Sarath]

^Yeah thats a big problem. We don't have dedicated servers since the game industry is so nacent here.

I have been playing OMRPGs on a massive scale for the past couple of years and I don't feel that we have bad ISPs. Its just that they are expensive. The best lines are actually provided by Reliance for their Zapak Gameplexes. Those are dedicated lines, or so I read, for low latency gaming.

so when it comes to playing the game, we rock, but in resources this country sucks.

Exactly. We have good gamers but not the dough to buy the systems.

 

[Anorion]

Oh yeah whole ton of prolems me playing an mmorpg and we have something known as ratios where the number of kills vs deaths are counted, I had chars with 1500 kills and 0 death and 5000+ kills and zero death. Normally I would have continued playing on wifi (dont use 3G as it takes ages to load anything), but those MSEB basterds started load shedding and because of that I died while in a game ruined my ratio because of load shedding, then all over again because I tried to play the game on 3G when the wifi was not working BIG MISTAKE. This is ignoring the occassional lag that crops up in the game, im using MTNL triband 1mbps, pauses for even a second or so is costly in the game as the action is so fast paced, and this is fortunately less frequent on my MTNL line but was very common when I was using cable LAN... apart from this I was prepared to schedule my day around the load shedding so that I wud be able to be in the game when the power was running.... but there is no notice given out to the housing societies about the timing of the load shedding, and even if you try to guess the timing, it is off by a as much as twenty minutes to half an hour every day, so there is no way to plan ahead and be safe, basically I find both the spectrum and any kind of internet I am able to get on my device unreliable for playing well on mmorpgs, at least for zerodeaths, and there is the load shedding issue on top of that if I could move to another country that gave me a rock steady internet connection I would right away... also apart from everything else there is the sheer distance... we are practically as far away from everywhere as possible... it sucks to have the worst pings in the game, go up to malasia or phillipines or go back up to greece or nl and those players have lower pings than you. You get to have the highest ping in the game just because of where in the world you are located.

 

[JojoTheDragon]

Its both good and bad at the same time.

The Good:
1)Games do come to India. And thankfully most publishers release their games at a affordable price. Ofcourse, some money-whore publishers like Activation don't do their part but it doesn't matter much.
2)I'm sure PC game servers are crap but console servers are always there and the latency is good.
3)You can now buy games from DD services like steam through bank features like VCC.
4)We have a good number of sites that deal in games and offer good discount.

The Bad:
1)Piracy is a big hit here and it hits game industry.
2)Dedicated servers for PC are pathetic if not non-existant.
3)DD services are too pricy.

 

[Sarath]

Dota has Indian servers I think and hence my PC experience has always been good. Friends playing CS (yes) also don't have any complains. Console has never lagged. Maybe that is why I am painting a pretty picture of everything.

Also I gamed on BSNL without any problems. I think the contention ratio must be really bad for your line to get screwed so often. I can call up airtel anytime if it goes below 4mbps or so I was told and I get 4.5mbps actually which is healthy for gaming. My friends are literally abusing their 2mbps airtel line by using 5 PCs for online gaming on it. No wonder they lag but 4 players play smooth which by itself is impressive considering theirs was the last slot in the apartment.
I think the problem lies mostly on the server side(game).

However gaming penetration is really low. Also most people think gaming is for kids. I cannot explain to them why I had to play "Heavy Rain" and "GoW3" when no one was around. Most are still stuck at Mario. But then even that is a game

Ok, I'll stop spamming this thread

 

[xtremevicky]

Okay here is what my experience was when I was hooked to CS.

Playing from home was sad because my airtel connection use to give me 100+ping on Vstreet servers . Only people in metros got good pings and I use to hate it.

BSNL gave better pings but it always laggy. I mean it use to run fine after 2 am but then again it was poor.

Zapak was too expensive on daily basics plus buying gaming gear was hard back then , We did not had Letsbuy , Flipkart then . It was sad that time and exposure was not there .

I think Gaming cafes will be fail in small cities due to lack of spending . ISP's need to improve.

 

[sygeek]

Let me tell you what sucks, the ISPs, the bandwidth speeds, the countless hours of downloading .mdl files, realizing that the modem just decided to go to sleep for a while leaving you in the middle of an epic clan match, crazy routing methods adopted by the ISPs and at last getting pings that are slower than my grandmother.

 

[gameranand]

Internet bandwidth - low for online play
Game prices - high for a common Indian
Contests - low
Indian servers - too low
The worst part is that there is no encouragement. Parents think that its just a child's play and can't be a profession. You require high end pc to play games which again is unacceptable to everyone.

Yes it sucks to be an Indian gamer

 

[tejaslok]

It still in initial stage, has to develop a lot and stop the piracy and the DD serv sucks in India and not much pref is given to gaming here, i have been to 2 or 3 Tournaments and sometimes they play "politics" because no one cares

 

[masterkd]

ISPs sucks in all fields(plans, service, quality). Other nations have much better bandwidth. MY friends in US hardly find anyone having below 2 mbps.

piracy is the main culprit in gaming industry. I even know people earning over a lakh a month saying "why spend rs. 300 while i can get the game in rs. 40." I found many people laugh at me when i say them i buy original games.

 

[thetechfreak]

We need atleast 2 mbps connectons. I have a unlimited connection but downloading games via Steam is as painfull as a Game Developer sees his games being pirated.

Downloading a 15 Gb game takes a week!!!(256 kbps) and I cannot afford Internet more expensive than that.

Game prices - high for a common Indian

Absolutely. Although GTA 4 costed Rs.500 but come on if one buys a Digital copy it should cost way less than DVD price.


My ping is like 150s even for a server in Mumbai! BSNL needs drastic improvement and must lead by example