There have been many rumors going around the internet this last few months, regarding the significant price hike of Electronics Arts games in India. Many Indian average PC gamers were hoping and praying that this should not be true. I came home from work last night and saw loads of notifications on Facebook. Curious at first, I soon came to realized the truth. All EA’s flagship games are on pre order! There was no controlling me from going on an buy-em-all spree..until I clicked on the link.
Many online resellers like Game4u , Flipkart have placed EA’s latest upcoming games for pre-order. It seems like that the rumors were true. Most of the gamers were happy to see it on preorders and many of them got shocked to see the price of the games like Battlefield 4, Need for speed and Fifa 14.
New prices are as follows:
Battlefield 4 – 3499 INR
Need for Speed Rivals- 3499 INR
Fifa 2014 – 2499 INR
Expect to see a similar price tag on more upcoming EA titles.
As you can see , the prices of the games is almost triple the amount before the hike. EA was looking to increase the price and make is equal to the international price. People tried to buy games from Indian origin websites through some proxies with significantly less price. There was no protection implemented against it. Thus, EA was suffering major loss.
This was going to happen anyway as there was increase in dollar price. But no one knew that the amount would be triple the amount they were used to pay. Most of the Indian PC gamer audience is unhappy with unfair pricing. You might just say that the pricing is fair as gamers in other countries pay 60$ for a game. But you have to understand low priced PC games is the reason why Indian gamer was so insisting of building himself a Gaming PC. Major part of the Indian gaming community own PC’s. PC hardware costs more in Indian market. So investment in the gaming PC might be more than console, but you have to look at the future point of view. You were better off buying a decent Next-gen gaming PC with better configuration compared to a console and spend less to buy PC games which were not only less expensive but much more advanced in graphics quality.
You will stumble upon quotes like this -
“Now that the game pricing is same, gamers might be better off with consoles as there are much better console exclusive goodness.”
If you were to head over to the Indian gaming communities on facebook or various forums, Gamers are really unhappy with EA right now. You will even see hordes of new topics related to this all over facebook pages, peoples timelines etc. Many fans have even decided not to pre-order their favorite sequels.
Of course gamers won’t be happy to pay triple the amount they used to pay before. Changing price from 20$ to 60$ is major step which might just go against EA sooner or later. 1700INR or 1800INR was a reasonable price tag to opt for. EA should have made some security arrangements in order to reduce losses from other countries. Changing regional pricing policy won’t be accepted if the difference is so huge. Many other big names such as Ubisoft have already increased their price tag on games due to this. Watch dogs which was priced 999INR for pre-order, is now available for 1500INR. It will be interesting to see how these games will sell in India after this price hike.
What do you think about this sudden price hike? Would you rather pre-order right now to get your gaming titles for cheaper? Let us know in the comments below!
