The video game industry say Brazil simply isn't a viable market for games because of the piracy rate. This isn't true. It’s not a viable market for games because of the tax rate.
Games which are six months old in the US are being sold through legitimate vendors at 250 reais, or around $140 US dollars. This is an exorbitant price. It’s prohibitive. If you’re reading this article, you're probably pretty into games and know many people who are. Think about yourself and your friends. How many games would you purchase per year at $140? One, maybe two? Would you buy a console in the first place if you knew that every game you were going to buy was $140? All the consoles I saw in Brazil were sold at roughly one and a half to two times their price in the United States as well.
What if I then told you that you couldn't get on Xbox Live in Brazil? Would you buy an Xbox 360?
Even the very wealthy Brazilians with whom I spoke bought the majority of their legitimate games through Steam or other digital distribution services. For console games, Play Asia is by far the most popular choice (Amazon won’t even ship most games to Brazil), followed by Submarino.com (which still has exorbitant prices but occasionally has good sales), with the local retail outlets being a distant third.
The sad fact about all this is that the retail outlets seem almost exclusively to cater to parents who don't know where else to go. That's anecdotal evidence, but after spending several hours loitering in major retail game stores in several different states, it seemed universally to be the case.
All this isn’t to say piracy isn't an issue. Pirate stores sell games at 5-15 reais ($2.80-$8.50) and have better service. For the most part, pirate game dealerships are small local operations that know their clientele and are willing to go further for their customers than the large retail chains. Interestingly enough, I heard people say that their pirate dealers would let them buy a game and, if they didn't like it, come back a few days later and switch it for something else. That's the sort of service I wish we had in the US.
Regardless of the extra service, people seemed interested in legitimate versions of games so long as they came at a reasonable price. In general people told me they’d be willing pay $20 to $30 more for a legitimate game over the pirated version. That number went up to approximately $40 if the game had internet play and required a legitimate version of the game to play online.
If anyone has sales figures of PlayStation 3 games in Brazil, I’d like to know. PS3 games are currently un-piratable due to the Blue Ray discs.
-- BY James Portnow --
------------------------------------------------
The only reason i copy/pasted this is to show you how hard the video gamers life is here o.e
damn taxes!
notes: i couldn't find anything about copy/pasting content on this site's privacy policy and this stuff, but i see a facebook "SHARE" button, so i don't see any problems if i post it here with the url of the original article (so.... i am not stealing any credits of the site or the author)
By 
