I live in dubai, I own a 360 with 14 games (Original, and the latest such as Gears 2, Fable 2, Fallout 3 and such). I assure you to that someone who said people are not aware of torrenting, they ARE aware of what a torrent is. MANY of them are. There are extreme PC gear heads in Dubai, in any general crowd in any country you wont find many of these types. You must know where to look.

Yes, alot of people play on PSN and Xbox live (Despite Xbox live not being introduced here) myself included. Most releases are on par with our mostly european providers. So we get most brand new titles around the same time as our european friends. (And thank goodness for that in this oh season of AAA titles that are raining down on us.)

You will also be surprised to know how much of a non-arab population (excluding indians who make up a large portion) populate dubai. The playstation and Sony shines brighter than Microsoft and even the PC sometimes. With the Wii staggering to make a market here (well not “Staggering” but it is struggling in comparison to the competition)

Oh and, a 500 person line up infront of a games retailer at the midnight launch of WoW Wotlk speaks for its self.

Just adding in some general info from a proud U.A.E gamer of Arab origin.

I also think Gears of war 2 is the best thing since sliced bread.

-Yazan

(TMI, rite?)

I had to look that up, but, not really.

1. The staple diet consists of bootlegged copies of Need For Speed, FIFA irrelevant-year-here, Cricket irrelevant-year-here and Grand Theft Auto version-that-can-run-on-intel-graphics-adapters. And of course, Counter Strike and Age of Empires (um, yeah).
Any mention of Deus Ex, Bioshock, Stalker, Gears of War or KOTOR- y’know, games, leaves people puzzled and confounded.
2. Piracy is the norm. Surprisingly, a large fraction of the teenage crowd have not discovered torrents yet, so most piracy involves either buying bootlegged copies for Rs. 100-200 (2-3 Euros), or passing around DVDs in classrooms and campuses. The idea of buying games is fairly alien- and somewhat ridiculous given their mindset (”I did pay for the PC, didn’t I?”).
3. Consoles are far from pervasive, probably because it’s hard to convince your (philistine) parents to buy you something that you can only play games with. As opposed to a PC, which salespeople assure have “educational uses”.
Also, pirated console games are much harder to find.
4. No graphics cards! Most people who play games don’t even know what that means. To them, the PC is still a hermetically sealed product, like a TV. Graphics cards are also prohibitively expensive (about twice as much as in the US), so most people are still stuck playing games from the early 2000s on awful resolutions.
I could go on, but I suppose that’s long enough for a comment. The generation of gamers who lend some respect to gaming when they grow up and become professionals is possibly yet to arrive in India. For now, though, the worse-than-outright-contempt attitude prevails.

Nice wee piece. It’s silly that so little is said and done about anywhere but American, Japan and Europe on the subject.