Board 8 > What Was Gaming Like in the Middle East?

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://youtu.be/aSp0Nf-BFvI

Made a video giving a slightly different perspective on the gaming landscape, what it was like to be a gamer in the Middle East. I thought it'd be fun to share for people wondering what gaming was like outside the US or Europe.

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has gaming ended??

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They're all god like at Tekken

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Steiner posted...

has gaming ended??

It's like hip-hop, it dies every couple of years

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this was a befuddling title. the middle east is a place, not a time period!

ah, you explain relatively quickly. You used to live there. cool! will watch

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It's fine

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What Was Gaming Like in the Middle East?


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@CaptainOfCrush

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I was about to tag yoblazer as well but I was like "Isn't that racist, he grew up here"

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Seems interesting, tagged for later!

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This was a cool video, thanks for sharing! I only had the most basic inkling of what gaming might have been like in Kuwait, so it was neat to find out much more.

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MetalmindStats posted...

This was a cool video, thanks for sharing! I only had the most basic inkling of what gaming might have been like in Kuwait, so it was neat to find out much more.

Glad you like it!

Tbf though some ppl mentioned that I didn't talk about the PC gaming cafes we had, which I wish I had brought up because they were cool.

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Cool shit, well edited and provides a little insight into a market I've never really thought about.

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cool video!!

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Nice vid! I left the Middle East as a six-year-old, so I never experienced gaming culture there, but it makes sense that piracy would render Nintendo a non-player there (the same way they seem to be in the Philippines).

You mentioned a large building that basically functioned as an indoor mall for bootleg games - was that the primary place to get games in the whole region? Did legit large retailers sell games (legit or bootleg) the same way Wal-Mart and Target do here?

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I can almost relate. The PS1 and PS2 era were where I was big on used games which could almost go that low in price, and it was always a bit of a hunt for who had the specific games I'd want between the few bigname stores and the roughly 20 pawnshops in my area.

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

You mentioned a large building that basically functioned as an indoor mall for bootleg games - was that the primary place to get games in the whole region? Did legit large retailers sell games (legit or bootleg) the same way Wal-Mart and Target do here?

Rihab was definitely THE place to buy games from. There were hardly any large retailers that happened to stock games like Walmart or Target do. There were some game stores outside Rihab though, which is where I assume all the people in the comments telling me they bought Nintendo stuff were going.

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It's interesting how mass piracy is something that is just accepted by the masses in society. And that's speaking on a global level, not singling out any one culture.

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I don't think it's a stretch to say that U.S. culture might be the most capitalistic/individualist (and least collectivist) in the world. The moral arguments we've often heard against piracy in this country would sound like alien speak to someone from the Middle East, the rest of Asia, or Latin America.

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@MechanicalWall I was in Kuwait in February. I didn't know about Al-Rehab
I must have gone pretty close to it quite a few times!

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I lived in Saudi Arabia in the 90s but it was before I was a gamer. I think my brother had his SNES at that time but I don't know where he was getting his games. I'll have to ask him.

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

I don't think it's a stretch to say that U.S. culture might be the most capitalistic/individualist (and least collectivist) in the world. The moral arguments we've often heard against piracy in this country would sound like alien speak to someone from the Middle East, the rest of Asia, or Latin America.

Yeah, well someone needs to buy it or nobody is going to bother to make it. I wont say the entertainment industry cant support a lot of piracy because it sure as hell has but somebody somewhere still has to buy at least some of them.

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XIII_rocks posted...

@MechanicalWall I was in Kuwait in February. I didn't know about Al-Rehab
I must have gone pretty close to it quite a few times!

It's in Hawalli I believe, which is one of the denser part of the country (as if the whole place isn't dense lol). Very good chance you passed by it at some point

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the title makes it sound like there isn't any gaming in the middle east any more.

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Webbernet posted...

Yeah, well someone needs to buy it or nobody is going to bother to make it. I wont say the entertainment industry cant support a lot of piracy because it sure as hell has but somebody somewhere still has to buy at least some of them.

That's true of course, but what I will say is that piracy at the very least propped up Sony's CONSOLE sales over Microsoft and Nintenso. Like I say in the video, why would you buy a Gamecube and pay top dollar for one game when you can buy a dozen of PS2 games for the same price.

Little comfort for the game's developers, of course, but I feel they didn't really factor places like the Middle East or South America into their projected sales figures, at least not at the time

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I found this video interesting because of how much it clashed with my own experience

We're talking like 10-15 years later and Qatar is more westernised than Kuwait so I suppose differences are natural but my experience is literally "go to Virgin/Tcc/Saqr, buy game". The big problem I have is the lack of trade-in. I didn't want to pay full price for Spiderman (I think) so I wanted to trade a used game for it but literally no stores do it here. I think it's heavily regulated (like sales/promotions in general).

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XIII_rocks posted...

I found this video interesting because of how much it clashed with my own experience

We're talking like 10-15 years later and Qatar is more westernised than Kuwait so I suppose differences are natural but my experience is literally "go to Virgin/Tcc/Saqr, buy game". The big problem I have is the lack of trade-in. I didn't want to pay full price for Spiderman (I think) so I wanted to trade a used game for it but literally no stores do it here. I think it's heavily regulated (like sales/promotions in general).

That sucks though, I think a free secondary market for used games is worth having and protecting.

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Me too but alas

I believe - and I'm not an expert - that there are anti-monopolistic hadith which lead to, like I said, regulations on sales and promotions in certain Islamic countries - so stuff like trade-in, that would lead to systemic price reduction, would be hard to get through. But maybe it's nothing to do with that. There's probably someone more knowledgeable about it than me out there that could explain it better or correct me.

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