I have to say that as a gamer, I’m spoiled.
I can get almost any video game I need in Dubai. There are countless retailers offering the latest games and accessories, not to mention bundled offers and limited editions. I can wander from shop to shop to find the best price, and usually when a game releases abroad, it’s available at retail stores in Dubai on the same day or a few days after.
But this freedom to game is apparently not the same around the Middle East. After reading a few comments left on my recent article, I reached out to two gamers in Egypt who were keen to talk about how different (and difficult) gaming was in their country. Here are their stories:
ZEYAD ELBADRAWY, 15
My name is Zeyad Elbadrawy. I was born in 1997 and I'm 15 years old but I've been playing video games since I was 3. That was when I got my first Playstation (2001). 3 years later I got the PS2 (2004). Getting the PS2 was when I started to get addicted to gaming. Soon after, I got the PS3 (2007) and then got the PSP on my birthday the following year. My latest console was the PSVita which I had gotten last October after saving up for it for about a year. So basically, I'm a Sony fanboy.
Nowadays, many more people I know have gaming consoles. When I was young, I was the envy of my class for being the first to get a PS2. Now, at least 20 of my friends have PS3s along with two having Xbox 360s. You'd think I would almost never have trouble finding someone to play online with but that would be a huge misconception. I play all kinds of games I can get my hands on as long as they are fun. They don't need re-playability nor multiplayer to get me to buy them. As long as I have fun with them and they get good reviews, I buy them. Most of my friends however get maybe one or two games every few months and unfortunately, THEY ARE ALL THE SAME. It's always either A) soccer, B) WWE, or C) First-Person Shooters.
Even though I am Egyptian, I'm not a big fan of soccer nor wrestling. I just think soccer is boring and I used to like WWE until I found out it was fake (age 7), then it was just stupid. As for FPS games, I enjoy them a lot but the thing is, I play all types of games. Most Egyptians play only the three genres previously mentioned and unfortunately, the Egyptian gamers that play diverse genres are forced to wait while these three genres are the only games to arrive anywhere near their release dates.
That is where trouble comes for me and other like-minded gamers in Egypt. Retail video game stores in Egypt are extremely scarce. The only ones I know of are Virgin Megastore, Game Valley, and Play N Trade. Now the first two, as any Egyptian would know, are complete rip-offs. They price the latest games (and by latest I mean at least 3 months late) at 500 or 600EGP (about $80 or 75$). Year old games sell for 400 or 350EGP ($65 or 60$) and games that almost never sell in Egypt such as (brace for shock) Elder Scrolls: Oblivion sell at 250EGP (40$) in 2008. For extreme gamers like me (and by extreme, I mean those who spend too much on games and have a huge library, not those that would kill you in your sleep for beating them at Call of Duty), it is almost impossible to get some of the greatest games shunned by so many Egyptian players at a reasonable price.
Now these problems give players two choices: (Note that Egypt is still a developing country, not a developed one like Dubai, the US, or most of Europe)
1) Go to these retailers and spend your hard-earned money on games that are unbelievably expensive and too far away from release date to be described as the "latest thing".
2) Be a Pirate.
Hands down, anyone would choose the latter. I will admit, when I first got my PSP, I was getting new games too slowly seeing as they were also overpriced. The problem in Egypt is that piracy is too easy and cheap. Just go to any electronics store and give it to the clerk for five minutes and you will walk away with your very own library for only 20EGP (about 3$). Everyone knows why piracy is bad, but seriously, we don't have a choice now do we? Games that are available online almost a week after release with seemingly no consequences is just too great a bargain. Heck, Sony, Microsoft, and so many more companies would sell more than a few thousand games in Egypt if it wasn't so neglected. We can't even buy games digitally thanks to Sony not making the PS3 accept Egyptian credit cards. This forces me to buy 50$ PSN Cards which are sold in Egypt for 60$. If you believed me when I said that games are sold at an unreasonably high price, trust me when I say consoles are worse. The PS3 was first released in Egypt at 8,000 EGP (1191$) though it got a quick price cut and is currently sold at half that price. My PSP was sold at 2,100EGP (312$) and my Wi-fi only vita was sold at 2,600EGP (387$)
Thankfully in Egypt, there is a third choice that came up just a few years ago and that is Facebook. In Egypt, there is no such thing as a zip code and therefore, there is no way to just order a game from Amazon or Gamestop. That is where the saviors of honest gaming in Egypt come to save the day. There are multiple groups on Facebook that somehow get games straight from Europe (and on special requests, USA for region 1 games) and sell them for their real price (60$). And best of all, they all arrive a week after release, sometimes less. There's Game Bazar, Gamesword, Gamerzlounge, Game Arcade Egypt, and so many more that sell the latest games for only 400 EGP a week after release date. I even ordered Sly Cooper from one of them and I was told it should arrive by next Sunday. These groups merely act as middle men between Egypt and foreign retailers as well as make an environment for people to sell or trade their own games and consoles to other players. This is THE best deal all around for all kinds of gamers in Egypt and probably the only solution.
To think that this could have all been avoided if only the gaming stores that are found all over the world were found somewhere in Egypt. For example, Virgin Megastore in the Dubai Mall is hosting a new program called Switch that lets players basically sell their games for credits to buy new games. This is proof of how bad conditions are in the rest of the countries like Egypt. Underdeveloped countries like Egypt are neglected by real retailers due to thinking few people will enjoy their games but they are actually pretty wrong. The type of gamer I described in the 2nd paragraph makes up about half of gamers in Egypt which has a population of almost 90 million people.
Outside developed countries like the USA, Europe, and Dubai, you'll almost never see anything video game related. This negligence is the reason why underdeveloped countries remain underdeveloped. This negligence is the reason piracy is spread throughout the world. And of course, this negligence is the reason honest Egyptian gamers are broke. Some people may complain that $60 is a lot for a game. I'm usually lucky to find them at $70.
YOUSEF AHMED, 20
Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Yousef Ahmed, I'm twenty years old and am a fourth year medical student living with my family in Cairo, Egypt. I'd proudly call myself a gaming geek. From the very early moments of touching that Atari 2600 controller when I was five, till the present time, my brother and I have willingly blasted tons of hours into gaming. Anything from Action\Adventure to puzzle and platformers, we both just seem to appreciate any game with a good engaging plot. However, I'm more of a PC enthusiast and he's more of a Playstation fanboy.
Growing up as gamers in Egypt has not been easy. It just seems that our country - being a third world country - is just not on the business giants' grid. For one thing, there are no dedicated games retailers. The only place that I know of where you can get your hands onoriginal game discs (yeah, I'm getting to the reason of that word being in italic in a few) is Virgin Megastore, and even that is not a convenient solution. I remember years ago, walking into the store when it had been months since Grand Theft Auto IV (one of my favorite games of all time) had been released for PC, and heading to the "PC Games Section" searching for it. I found myself coming to a pitiful sight. A single stand with no more than 20 different games (some of which dating back to 2003!). Even games on other platforms are significantly expensive (compared to their prices abroad) if available. And the problem is not just limited to the games, console prices are also through the roof. I remember that a PS3 cost equivalent to $550 at the time when its price was $299 on US online shopping services. And we're talking about an exploitation in a country where the monthly income of a person is around $200. The situation with digital downloads is not a better one. Rarely will you be able to find a young individual in our country with an internationally valid credit card. Besides, the internet connection, even here in the capital city, is crippled by slow speeds, inconsistency, and in some cases, download limits.
So people tend to find workarounds. On one hand, you've got this minority of hardcore educated gamers setting up their own community, unwilling to surrender to reality. They devise many techniques to get their fix, probably the most famous one around here is communities that import games (or gaming peripherals) from the US or the UK and sell them to gamers. Now this is completely unofficial and many of such organizations (sometimes just regular persons seeking to make a personal profit) use Facebook groups to contact their customers and arrange a delivery. Of course it comes to an extra cost and sometimes you have to wait a while after the release date, but it's a cost some seem willing to pay. On the other gloomy end of things, you've got the rest of the gaming population sadly depending absolutely on piracy. With a mixture of a government focused mainly on feeding the growing population, a lack of awareness among the citizens concerning the subject, and a lack of a proper convenient alternative (or that alternative being unjustifiably expensive or unacceptably late as previously discussed), piracy blooms through the whole country - to the extent that you'll find pirated versions being sold publicly and openly at local stores downtown, you may even stumble on a flyer from time to time (of course they're never called "pirated", they're just called "copies"). You even have "Playstation cafes" (as they're called here) where teens can hang out playing illegally downloaded copies of competitive games (mainly football which is kind of a big thing here) on modified consoles are found in nearly every corner of the city's streets. What’s worse is that most people are unaware that they're buying or playing pirated games.
Perhaps the games corporations see the piracy numbers and perhaps they know the facts mentioned above. Perhaps that’s the reason they're reluctant to establish a market in the region, but it is one vicious cycle - no market leads to piracy, and piracy leads to no market. But in the end it's us, the loyal gamers, who pay the price. I do believe piracy is a wrong thing, but I also believe that gaming should be a transcendental form of media, not limited to where you happen to have been born. Because though we may come from different backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different ideologies, when we put those headsets on and fire up our favorite game, we are essentially just the same - enthusiasts escaping reality to our own magical world of video games.
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