Why finding copies of Sony games is slowly becoming impossible in India

It’s a complaint that I hear every time I speak to a video game store buyer: ‘Why are there so few copies of God of War, The Last of Us and Uncharted? Why can’t Sony bring in more?’

And you know what? I can’t blame them.

Bigger stores like e-commerce behemoth Flipkart have solved their supply issues: they simply purchase the games from gray-market channels. This means that they charge more than the suggested retail price, although that makes sense since the games are imported. For India, Sony’s first-party games are manufactured locally.

So why are supplies of Sony games so low right now? Because Sony India isn’t manufacturing them, or at least isn’t distributing anything it might be manufacturing. Retailers like Flipkart would never be selling gray-market games if official copies were available, so the fact that they are means Sony India isn’t offering any product to Indian distributors.

Exactly why that’s the case is unclear. Sony declined to comment for this article, but the retailers I spoke to didn’t. Independent outlets or mom-and-pop stores make up around 40-50 percent (depending which distributor you ask) of the market in India. Unlike the bigger chains, most of them don’t have a reliable way to import first-party Playstation 3 games now that official domestic channels have dried up. The result is that at many of these shops, you simply can’t find Sony’s first-party games anymore.

A price increase thanks to the lack of official supply.

To make matters worse, India is, for all practical purposes, a Sony country. The quantity of games sold on the PS3 is on par with, if not greater than, the games sold on PC. Though Playstation 4 sales haven’t picked up as much due to supply constraints, they will eventually if history is any indication.

And of course, being the number one console in any comes a sizeable chunk of software sales. At the moment, Sony first-party games make up around 30 percent of all game sales at retail. But that’s probably going to change, because those games are getting harder and harder to find.

And most retailers who can’t afford the high import rates to bring in Kratos, Joel, and Nathan Drake are quite happy replacing them with Ezio, Aiden Pearce, and Lara Croft. Yes, it has reached a point where third-party titles from publishers like Ubisoft and Square Enix are making a dent in what has been Sony’s share of the pie.

“For quite some time we have not been able to order Sony’s platinum titles, so we’ve had to order third-party instead to make up the numbers for the month,” one retailer told me. It’s a common quip amongst independent retailers.

Expect to see a lot more of Assassin’s Creed on the store shelves to replace the lack of first-party PS3 goodness.

“But what about the used market?”, you ask. Well, that’s pretty much dried up by now. Usually you’d see robust availability of these games pre-owned. A quick search on Ebay India indicates that you can pick up The Last of Us used for INR 2200 (approx. $37). Decent compared to the current going rate of INR 2999 (approx. $50) for a new gray-market import. But it’s a year old with a HD remaster on the way. And if it were available officially, it would cost INR 2699 (approx. $45) new. This makes it an expensive proposition.

So whether it’s to gray imports, substitutions of third-party games, or a sudden yet unlikely influx of pre-owned copies, the bottom line is that Sony India stands to lose out on potential customers because of the lack of official copies of these games in stores.