GTA V on PC in India is 5 times more expensive than GTA IV, and here’s why

This week has been all smiles for PC gamers. Both Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain have been confirmed for the platform.

However for PC gamers in India, it’s been a mixed week. Sure, the news of Snake crouching onto Steam was nice, but the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V’s price for the nation was met with shock.

(See: An interview with the modder who turned GTA IV’s Liberty City into a Chinese metropolis)

GTA V‘s PC pricing went live last night on Games The Shop, a retailer owned by the game’s distributor.

At INR 2499 (approx. $41) it’s a shade lower than what US gamers have to pay, what with Gamestop listing it at $59.99, but it’s still steep compared to other triple-A games in India.

You see, when GTA IV released on PC in December 2008, India had it at INR 499 ($8). And it set a tone for a generation of cheaply-priced games. In those days, you could get The Sims 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and Borderlands at launch on PC for a grand total of INR 2997 (around $50).

The low price point for GTA IV allowed distributors some bargaining power with publishers for subsequent game releases, arguing that if they want their games to have a chance of selling, the price had to be low.

Some publishers refused to budge though. Bethesda and Activision Blizzard continued pricing their games on par with, if not higher than, their prices globally. In hindsight, it was a wise move.

But the other games, the ones that did get priced lower, came with a side effect: re-export. Game stores would take advantage of the low pricing and sell games for a higher profit to overseas clients.

A lot of them would order a hundred or two hundred units of a game, with the bulk of them exported to countries like Thailand and Brazil. And if the game had Steam support, they’d simply email keys to resellers on marketplaces like Kinguin.

(See: Awesome costumes: Thailand’s Onnies rocks Bayonetta and League of Legends)

Every day used to be a Steam sale in India. But that’s likely to change.

It reached a point where customers would wonder why games weren’t on the shelves and distributors would question why small, hole-in-the-wall stores with next to no foot traffic were ordering humongous quantities of PC games.