EA will not release physical disc versions of its forthcoming games in India.
This means that Indian gamers won’t be able to buy PC versions of games like FIFA 15 and Dragon Age: Inquisition in stores, and will instead have to buy them digitally via EA’s online service, Origin.
However, this does not affect EA’s console games, which will get disc releases in India.
EA has, over the last couple of years, been slowly bringing prices of its physical PC releases in India on par with prices on Origin, which are equivalent to those in most Western markets. That has seen PC games go up in price from Rs 999 to Rs 1,499 to Rs 2,499 and last year to the Origin-equivalent of Rs 3,499.
Milestone Interactive, EA’s distributor for India, had said that EA didn’t see lower prices in India leading to a corresponding increase in sales, and that prompted the publisher to abandon preferential pricing for the Indian market.
“In India, PC pricing has been way lower than anywhere else, and it’s an English product, so there’s a risk of it finding its way to other English-speaking markets. Given that we’ve maintained a certain pricing for all these years, we’ve never got that quantum jump in volume the moment prices were dropped,” Milestone chairman Jayont Sharma had told MCV in 2012 when EA had begun normalising prices.
However, with Indian PC gamers accustomed to paying Rs 999 for their games, prices nearly four times that were bound to result in a substantial drop in sales, and it appears that drop was drastic enough for EA to abandon physical releases altogether.
We’ve contacted EA for more details on this development, and we’ll update the story as we hear back.