Brazil Gets Shafted on Games They’ll Never be Able to Afford

You may think that Germany and Australia have a bad time when it comes to violent games and censorship. While this is true, and the situations over there are not favorable for gamers, I’d definitely have to say Brazil has it far worse. Being the country with the ninth largest purchasing power in the world, you’d think that their access to games would be pretty decent.

Well, if this is any indication of their modernity with console releases, the Playstation 2 came out November 18 of last year. Sounds great, huh? They probably just got Ico if my memory of the system’s release timeline are the same (and if they’re holding to it).

A bill proposed in early December of last year will likely make this already terrible situation even worse. The bill would make games ‘œthat affect the customs, traditions of the people, their worship, creeds, religions and symbols’ illegal to sell or produce.

For a bit more background on the Brazilian gaming “scene”, I had a look at Gameculture.com’s tour of Brazil’s game culture (1 & 2). Piracy is rampant in Brazil. With legitimate copies of games that were released a couple of months ago costing the equivalent of $150 US, and consoles costing roughly $900 US, it’s hard to justify those purchases as a consumer. As a producer, it’s hard to justify bringing those products over due to the inevitable low sales and high taxes.

That’s where the bootleg shops come in. You can get games that would normally cost $150 for a tenth of that price from the bootleggers. I doubt that at that much of a price difference, anyone would buy the legitimate version.

So if this bill does in fact pass, piracy will only be more justified to the Brazillian consumers, because they most likely won’t even be able to legitimately purchase the “offensive” games. (And let’s be honest, what game isn’t offensive these days?)

It depresses me to think that there are countries out there (as witnessed in our series on the Romanian gaming scene) that don’t have the access to current games and hardware at a reasonable price. What sucks even more is that a lot of these countries have laws and taxes in place that prevent games from gaining legitimacy as viable entertainment media, so Brazillians have to resort to piracy. Because of this, the original developer/publisher never gets any sign of these new markets that crop up all over the world, and are unable to help with localization or distribution in any way. I just wish everyone could get along, and (not) enjoy games the way we do.

Via: Gamepolitics