At long last, you will soon be able to walk into a gaming or electronics store and find Overwatch, Diablo 3, and other games from Blizzard Entertainment on shelves.
That’s thanks to the developer-publisher partnering with Indian distributor E-xpress Interactive to release its games in India.
Check out the complete list of games that will be available in India and their prices at the bottom of this post.
Blizzard was the last remaining major publisher to not have a distribution partner in India. The reason for that – depending on whom you asked – was either Blizzard’s unwillingness to offer prices in line with what was expected in India or because India was simply too small a market for Blizzard to care enough.
If the reason was the for more, Blizzard certainly seems to have climbed down from that stance, because most games are quite reasonably price. That being said, most of them are also quite old now and cannot command a full price.
The exception is Blizzard’s most recent release – multiplayer FPS Overwatch, which is priced Rs 3,299 on PC and Rs 3,999 on consoles. It’s higher than the older titles, but still very much in line with what you would pay for a first-party PS4 game.
Here’s the complete list of Blizzard titles that will be available in India over the coming weeks:
- World of Warcraft (PC): Rs 699
- World of Warcraft: Legion (PC): Rs 1,999
- Warcraft 3 Gold Edition (PC): Rs 999
- Diablo II Gold (PC): Rs 999
- Diablo III (PC): Rs 1,299
- Diablo III Reaper of Souls (PC): Rs 1,299
- Diablo III Battle Chest (PC): Rs 1,999
- Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition (PS4, Xbox One): Rs 1,999
- Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition (PS3, Xbox 360): Rs 1,499
- Overwatch Origin Edition (PC): Rs 3,299
- Overwatch Origin Edition (PS4, Xbox One): Rs 3,999
- StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC): Rs 999
- Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void (PC): Rs 999
- StarCraft II: Battle Chest (PC): Rs 1,999
All of the above games are available for pre-order at Games The Shop, but at the time of writing, none of them were listed on Amazon or Flipkart (aside from import units).
While it’s great to see Blizzard games now being sold in India, the publisher is known to take years to release new games, and so Overwatch will continue to be the newest game in its catalogue for a while to come. In the mean time, it’ll be interesting to see if the partnership between Blizzard and E-xpress will extend beyond simply distribution and towards popularising franchises like Diablo, Starcraft and Overwatch, which are household names in the West, but not as popular in the sub-continent. Yet.