Gaming Abroad: South Africa

Our series now travels to the lower hemisphere to check in with South African resident and beloved blogger The Extremist.

We often hear the woes of gaming outside prime-release regions. Can you tell us about any possible advantages?

I'd love to be positive but as of mid-2008 there are no advantages to being a minority user base this far from the prime-release regions.

South Africa isn't really a grey-market region. We have official distributors like Megarom and Ster-Kinekor Games that supply our local retailers with legal copies of games obtained from the publishers. Our largest local games retailer, BTGames, also seems to be doing quite well despite the economic climate.

Obviously there's nothing inherently bad about this. Having a legitimate local supply chain for games is actually pretty awesome. The issue is how long we wait for retail releases as well as the recent price hikes . . . but more on that later.

If you want “grey imports” (as they are incorrectly called here, because pirate games are not non-counterfeit) then you have to go to a flea market. Stalls selling illegally copied/counterfeit goods are frowned upon and the authorities do harass them, so commercial piracy isn't as mainstream as in other grey-market regions. You also won't really find stores that overtly sell pirate games anymore. There was once a franchise called Defcon 5 that sold “grey imports” but my local outlet seems to have gone completely legal. They only sell legitimate hardware and software now (I actually got my copy of Psychonauts there recently).

I assume it is harder and more expensive to acquire many games in your country—how do you cope with or circumvent the difficulty?

I wouldn't say it's harder. Often we wait longer for retail releases but once they arrive you can pick them up from a number of dedicated video games or PC/tech franchised stores.

For those that aren't interested in the economics of it all, here's the short of it. How do South Africans deal with delayed retail releases and comparatively more expensive games? There are two ways I can see to deal with it. You can do with less games, purchased less frequently and/or not purchase on release day, or you can pirate.

Even piracy poses significant challenges to the average South African consumer. Americans and Europeans are beginning to learn about “caps,” or limits on the amount of bandwidth you are allowed to use per month. We've had those since the inception of ADSL broadband in South Africa. Bandwidth was rationed out in 3GB chunks initially but nowadays you can use as much as you like so long as you pay for it. Despite the challenges, piracy remains rife.

Now for the long of it.

At the current rates of exchange one gigabyte (1GB) of bandwidth usage per month will cost you at least $5. That's excluding the cost of ADSL rental. You need to rent a phone line at R120, and the cheapest ADSL (384kbps or 0.3Mbps) costs R152, for a total of R272 (or at least $30) per month. A 4Mbps line will set you back R533 (or at least $60) per month.

Now for some arithmetic. A 4.7GB (one DVD) game will take you about 36 hours to download at 0.3Mbps and about 3 hours at 4Mbps. The download bandwidth alone (if you're torrenting then there'll definitely be a decent amount of upload bandwidth being used as well) will cost you $25. If you factor in the upload bandwidth and the long time an entry-level connection is locked down for (while you're downloading you basically can't do anything else with the Internet) then you might as well buy the game at $50.

However, where there's a will there's a way. Piracy remains pretty widespread despite the draconian limitations imposed on our Blogotubes. This is thanks mainly to filesharing over good old-fashioned LAN as well as the advent of unpowered USB external hard-drives and 8GB flash-disks (some might wrongly be calling them “thumb-drives”).

Up until recently (about mid-200 PC gaming wasn't more expensive than in Europe or America. PC games were in fact cheaper through our local retail channels than if you were to buy the game through a digital distribution service. Console games varied. If you compared the prices to the Rand(R)/US Dollar ($) exchange rate then most carried the same prices as their US counterparts. If a game was imported directly (without some sort of distribution deal) then import duties on a $50 game drove the price up by $15 - $20.

Last year PC game prices increased to be around the same price as games cost in the US. We now pay R400-R500 for most releases (which translates to about $50-$65, depending on the exchange rate). Distributors and retailers are blaming the weakening of our local currency, the Rand, against the US Dollar for the price hikes but it just doesn't seem like a plausible reason. For many years, despite massive fluctuations in the rates of foreign exchange, PC games cost R299. Only games published by Microsoft (Flight Sim, Dungeon Siege 1 and 2) cost R399.

Since I'm but average-Joe, “the public,” and the man-on-the-street, I'm not privy to the real reasons for the dramatic increase in the cost of games. If I made a rational guess though, I'd wager that the reason our retailers were able to keep the prices at constant levels all these years is because our distributors had distribution deals in place with publishers that allowed them to sell the games for prices they knew the public were willing and able to pay. When the current economic crisis hit the Land of the Free the publishers based there had to relook those deals. So now our distributors are paying normal prices to bring the games into the country, the retailers have to increase their prices accordingly and I, poor average-Joe, feel it in my pocket.

The plight of the console gamer might be as simple as an exchange rate issue. From what I can tell the prices of consoles and their games have always been liked to the R/$. While it might be argued that the prices of console games have remained relatively constant when compared to the rate of exchange of the Rand to the Dollar over time, the average consumer's net income has unfortunately not increased by the same margin.

It’s been suggested that international gamers in some regions are almost backed into a corner of piracy—to what extent would you agree with this statement?

South Africans able to afford a gaming platform definitely have a choice. So I must somewhat disagree since we're definitely not backed into a corner. That said, the current price of console games make them fairly unattractive to buy. The only thing saving our PC retail market at the moment is our expensive bandwidth costs. Since we sometimes only see a local retail release a month or so after the initial release, online distribution is becoming very attractive.

We're being promised more affordable bandwidth and higher line speeds within the coming months. If that happens I predict a general failure in our PC retail market as paying customers turn to Steam and Impulse to get the games when the rest of the world gets them, at prices they would've been paying at retail anyway.

Getting back on topic . . .

Compared to the total population, the middle and upper classes of South Africa are actually quite small. They represent the portion of the public actually able to afford gaming as a hobby, however. If I had to conservatively estimate the average middle-class net salary I'd peg it at R6000 (or about $750) per month. I'm not that up-to-date with the prices of consoles but I'd say a Wii or Xbox360 costs about half a month's salary and the PS3 about a month's salary. A decent gaming rig will set you back about 2 months' salary.

A console game costs 13% - 17% of an average middle-class earner's salary per month whereas a PC games can take a 7% - 10% chunk. I can empathise with console gamers. Even PC games have got a little expensive for the average middle-class South African. Are we backed into a corner? Definitely not. Our circumstances are somewhat more extreme but we're presented with the same choice many American and European gamers are: Make do with less (i.e. don't play every new title that comes out), or pirate.

My views on the general topic of piracy are for another time I think.

What can developers and publishers do to better respect the wants of the international community?

Simple engineering/corporate bullet points for this one.

    * Be aware of the rest of the world's Internet speed limitations when building a game's online multiplayer component (I'm looking at you, Demigod).
    * Know the difference between bandwidth and latency!
    * Please don't strip LAN multiplayer out of everything. Flagship was a culprit here and more recently Blizzard. Diablo 3 is confirmed to have no LAN and apparently StarCraft 2's LAN support is still to be confirmed. Knowledge of the nature and effects of latency will make it evident why people far removed from game servers won't be able to play multiplayer if there's no LAN support (or some mechanism to host our own servers online).
    * Give us back our distribution deals that made our game prices independent of the exchange rate or risk killing our retail PC games market altogether.
    * Include us in some of the “international” competitions for a change. I'm no lawyer but if some of the dodgy late-night game shows and cellphone-based “competitions” are anything to go by our laws are certainly no more restrictive than those of the most lenient states in the USA.

Can you describe the experience of being a gamer in your country? Is there anything that might surprise European and American gaming communities?

As it is elsewhere in the world, gaming has become a much more mainstream pastime. We actually have a huge expo here once a year called rAge (for Really Awesome Gaming Expo). It's grown into a show of some notability.

Megarom, the distributor for Atari, managed to bring a beta build of The Witcher to the 2007 show. Being able to play The Witcher a few months before its actual release was amazing. It's an experience I typically associate with massive international expos/conventions/conferences. The following year (200 we had guys from Ubisoft out here showing off Far Cry 2 and letting us play a pre-release build of that.

South Africa also boasts a pretty vibrant LAN scene. The NAG (a local gaming magazine) LAN at rAge is by far the largest, accommodating 1800 registered attendees, but it is also annual. There are many smaller LANs that usually happen once a month in most of the larger cities around the country.

While we've fielded a number of teams (consisting of CS, WarCraft 3, StarCraft, and UT players) at the World Cyber Games, more recently South Africa's Team Bravado took on a formidable team composed of PMS Clan and SK Gaming members. PluGG, a local ISP, organised the event and called it the PluGG Girls vs. Guys Game-Off. In the end our local boys beat the PMS/SK ladies at Counter-Strike.