Landscape of Brazilian Games Industry

[Anonymous]

I hear more and more references to Brazil being the next big market that the whole world is readying to crack.

Gamasutra has an article here with some key points here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26645/Analysis_Inside_Brazils_Video_Game_Ecosystem.php

Somethings that stood out for me was:

1. the price of old games 140$ is a joke.

2. Amazon allegedly "wont ship games to brazil." what??? Brazil is the largest country in south america. Population is just shy of 200 million (yep, two hundred million!). Sao Paulo (11m), Brasilia (2.6m)
respectively.

3. "Oi Futuro Nave" sounds good – I wonder if Ireland could get Vodafone/Eircom/3/02 to cough up a suite of labs like this?

4. No mention of ZEEBO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeebo ) which has its eyes firmly set on the Brazilian market.

5. The comments at the bottom of the article paint a pretty damning picture of life, as a games consumer in Brazil. "local/domestic-use credit cards" that aren’t accepted by paypal???

This explains good part of the piracy: The ONLY way to have a legal game, is buy it, and pay the outrageous taxes (at least, if you are lucky, 60% of the game AND shipping prices summed. If you are unlucky, 273% of the game (without shipping) price + whatever tax on shipping itself.)
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Ouch.

6. Steam, at present, are going unnoticed, but I wonder for how long that’ll last now that this article is out in the wild.

B.

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