ASidCast: "If you’re a gamer in India, you know that this place is a hotbed for piracy to the point that if you go up to an official Sony showroom in some small town, they’ll offer to crack your PlayStation 3 or PSP for a fee, and that’s just speaking of small towns. Even in cities like Delhi, Kolkata or Mumbai, you’ll find street side stalls selling pirated PC games for a nominal fee with zero guarantee that the games you buy from said stalls will actually run to begin with. Every single gamer I’ve come to know in India was a pirate at one point or the other in their gaming life, including myself. But is piracy something that’ll never go away from the Indian gaming scene?"
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
"The best games of the year and the creative teams behind them were in the spotlight at the grand award ceremony of the German Computer Game Award 2024." - German Computer Game Awards.