With the release of Crimson Desert which was ₹4500 on launch (About $45) but the fact is currency conversion doesn't work like this and having $45 in US might be nothing whereas ₹4500 in Inida is a month's worth of groceries for a family.
Final Update:
The friend who's making a lot of money decided otherwise after I explained to him the risks of HV Denuvo Bypass & also after he saw
my passwords and login sessions being leaked from the Browsec VPN Browser extension
* and realizing he did have important documents on his PC and it was not worth taking the risks, however little.
I on the other hand, went back to no-piracy like I have been for the past many years but for a different reason. If I open myself to piracy I start running around like a headless chicken^ and keep installing games after games and always think about the next one instead of the current one.
At least until I have games in my library (which are a lot if I include Epic Games' Free Games into it) I will not think about it.
We thought we could just take UltraKill Developers words that
Culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it
but it's not realistically possible given the risks.
So, for both of us, and for the majority of paying gamers^^ in India,
We are going back to playing decade old games or a few handful of Indie games that we can afford with Family Sharing on Steam & DRM-free games via GOG.
As long as we don't check the latest releases on Steam & stop watching youtube** and stop listening to our friends about the current games, we believe we will be mildly okay.
P.S: Please accept my heartfelt apologies for such lackluster use of the English language. Alas! English isn't my first language.
* Funny how it wasn't the games or softwares I pirated all these days but a Browser Extension of all things!
** youtube has been intentionally not given a first capital letter. Any company that allows running scams in their ad system loses all respect from me.
^ Maybe it's undiagnosed ADHD but for the time I was in a job making money and decided to see an "expert" about it in Delhi. That Doctor gave me very potent sleeping pills (Ecitalopram) which is technically a solution since I won't have any problems if I am not awake.
^^ Which are again a minority due to the same overinflated price reasons.
Update: The friend who makes a lot of money in IT from IIT who was very excited for the game dropped the idea after seeing the ₹4500/$45 tag. He assumed just like other AAA games he has bought recently that this will also be around ₹3000/$30.
And this game turned him into a pirate. Earlier he only played games he could afford but this game and the Death Stranding 2 broke him.
And just so you know, $45 for developed countries is very very different than ₹4500 in developing countries. Currency conversion doesn't take many other things into account.
Update: Never mind. It's hard to express living standards to each other. While $70 might be pocket change for many, it's the salary a well-to-do government or private engineer makes in a day where I live, and these are the minority—the majority only dreams about it.
If the 2023 price adjustment didn't happen, I might have considered this game. But right now, I can't.
Back in 2023 when Steam "adjusted" the regional pricing, a lot of games got really expensive right away and seems like the game now is beyond what AAA games sell at.
Is this also happening in your region or not?
I made the following
post on Steam as my friend and even I expected the game to be more around ₹3000 and he was even ready to pay that amount but seeing the close to ₹5k cost, he dropped the idea completely.
India is out of the current gaming culture
Then I remembered that something happened in 2023 which made games so much more expensive. I should also point out that it was not only Steam Price increase but games which used to go on higher discounts just stopping going on such discounts and let's look through some of them here:
The following games' discount percentage dropped so effectively price was increased but it happened for all regions so this is not relevant to this particular blog, or so I think but recently I learnt that just discounts are a way for decreasing price regionally in some random YouTube video, however, from my research it doesn't seem so as discounts usually carry over into all regions.