Gamer in Asia: the best 4 sites for getting the gaming gear you need in Asia

I love living in Asia, but sometimes it’s tough to get what you need. Others may have glorious access to super-speedy fibre optic magic, but most of us do not. And trust me, that can be very frustrating. In fact it nearly resulted in the drowning of my PS4 a few weeks ago! Even if you do have super fast internet, that doesn’t always mean that you can download as much as you want whenever you want, as you can see from the link below.

(See: Gamer in Asia: why I want to throw my PS4 into the South China Sea)

So if you’re stuck with crappy internet access and a hankering for a game you just can’t get your hands on, what do you do, and who can you trust? We’ve already told you how to get your gear from the local markets safely, so let’s move to cyberspace. Here are our tried and tested websites for getting you the products of your dreams as quickly and efficiently as possible.

1) Playasia

Playasia is probably the go-to site for gamers in Asia. It’s fast, it’s reliable, and often has some pretty good deals. The website itself is far from good looking, but has decent customer service and reasonable shipping costs, so much so that I’m willing to overlook its early 00s look.

Playasia also has a cool feature where it calculates the shipping cost of the item at checkout. This feature takes into account everything from weight and dimensions, to shipping companies and customs. I asked other buyers and they agree that they have never had a problem getting stuff from A to B using Playasia. Which, when you live somewhere like China, is a miracle!

Playasia can also provide digital codes and keys for all the major gaming stores such as Steam, PSN, and Xbox Live. These keys can be delivered via email for your convenience. However, Playasia’s reliable shipping is not always the quickest, and if speed and physical buys are important to you, then you may require soemthing a little more local.

2) Taobao

Taobao is my go-to store within China, but only within China. While Taobao does international shipping, I would check other options before resorting to Taobao. As I know personally, China’s customs and exports can be unpredictable.

(See: My China console gaming nightmare)

Taobao is a mix between Ebay and Amazon, everything is sold by individual seller (or stores, as they are referred to on Taobao). The whole thing is very strictly managed by Taobao monitors, and after two years of regular use I have never once had a problem that wasn’t immediately resolved.