Videogaming in a Third-World Country

It's Christmas, and you wake up with a wide grin across your face. Your entire day is filled with nothing but joy and laughter, and the festivities carry on until nighttime when it's finally time to open the presents. Exhilarated, you pick up the small, rectangular gift and open it to find a PlayStation 2 to play with. Except, it isn't the year 2000, but the present day.

I'm located in Colombia, a third-world country where one in every three families cannot afford to eat three meals a day and is currently at a 39.3% poverty rate. I am, thankfully, one of the lucky citizens that live above the poverty line, but many of my friends and colleagues weren't so fortunate. I'm here to tell the story of how it feels growing up in a third-world country and trying to get into videogames.

The first time I got into videogames was around 2005 when my mother showed me one of the titles she'd been playing for years: Heroes of Might & Magic III. This game was one of the best I'd experienced and, since my crappy computer at the time could handle it, it became what is now my first encounter with videogames. In fact, I played Heroes of Might and Magic III so much that I became unbeatable by the CPU. It wasn't until much later — two years, in 2007 — that I began truly experiencing videogaming.

In third-world countries, videogaming is one of the most expensive hobbies; with the dollar price rising sporadically, consoles (and titles for those consoles) are borderline unaffordable for even the highest-paid Colombians. In my article talking about regional pricing, I explain that a AAA game without regional pricing can cost 1/4 of the monthly minimum wage. Since that article, numerous games have arrived on Steam with even higher prices, including Forspoken, which has upped that number to 1/3 with its Deluxe Edition. If you want to learn more about that, feel free to check out the article!

One thing many people don't know about living in a third-world country is that everything arrives late here. Now, I don't mean state-of-the-art technology coming a couple of years late — especially since nowadays we can get everything shipped through Amazon — but rather trends. While many people are now enjoying the PlayStation 4 (with a lucky few having the luxury of playing the ever-elusive PlayStation 5), Colombians still play the PlayStation 2. Now, this is in large part because the console is 100% hackable, making it the most accessible for newcomers and those that don't have enormous piles of cash to drop on a PlayStation 5 (which costs a little over six minimum wages without spending a cent elsewhere).

This price disparity between what we should have to play in contrast to what we do makes the pirating culture incredibly common. You can search online for a pirated console to purchase at the largest online store available, or you can even drive to a mall-like area (called San Andresito) that sells a bunch of hacked things (not just consoles) at a fraction of the price they cost on the market. With sky-high prices, a lot of state-of-the-art technology becomes feasible to purchase only when they can be hacked and sold alongside the games. This causes our culture to stagnate, like discovering "brand-new" titles several years after their release. 

So, in 2012, the latest console I owned was the Wii; if you read my anniversary article for the Nintendo Wii, you'll know that this console was built to be affordable, and even that felt like a large step. I only did it when I knew I could comfortably buy it and pirate the games. At the time, despite being a high-income member of the country, the Nintendo Wii was the only affordable choice without having to sacrifice just a little too much money for a console, a hobby I didn't know if I'd like enough. Later that year, I bought a 3DS, the first (and last) next-gen console I would buy for years.

The 3DS felt like an exhilarating purchase despite being a year late to the party; I was experiencing some games as they were released with other members of the world, and, as a gamer, I finally didn't feel alone. Videogaming isn't common in Colombia, and often if you announce yourself as a gamer, you're weird unless you strictly play Call of Duty (our title is “Friki”, the Spanish variant for “freaky”). So playing New Super Mario Bros. 2 with the whole world felt like a surreal experience. Surreal and — unfortunately — short-lived.

A shop in my town named "FrikiZone", dedicated to anime and games!

After burning through the games I'd bought with my 3DS, I found that the prices of these titles were ludicrous due to the lack of regional pricing (a commonality for Nintendo). I couldn't afford to continue buying the latest releases, and I, much like other gamers I've met since then, gave up on trying to be an upstanding citizen and buying everything legitimately; I returned to old habits and began hacking older consoles once again. The 3DS marked the last time I'd buy a last-gen console for nearly eight years because the games were plain unaffordable.

I moved on from playing new videogames and spent most of my time revisiting "new" games that were cool in Colombia. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii became my favourite game, and I spent hours upon hours playing that. I revisited older consoles that could be hacked, such as the original Xbox (which I still have to this day) and played those games instead; the experience wasn't lonely either, as it was at around this time that I began connecting with my wife more. We played Left 4 Dead 2 as if it was a brand-new release for years to come.

My videogame craze (and borderline addiction) began when I discovered Steam and how some games there were regionally priced (another topic mentioned in the regional pricing article). There, I began buying games, including Fallout 4 despite its unreasonably high price, and experienced even deeper how it felt being involved in the release of a brand-new title, as now (2015 at the time) I could be considered a tech-savvy novice Colombian. The next (and last, for real this time) big console purchase I'd make was the PlayStation 4, because I couldn't not get my hands on God of War (2018), and once again, I suffered the same fate I did with the 3DS. God of War (2018) became one of the few titles I'd buy and play before I had to sell the console due to the upcoming pandemic only a few years after, and even that hit us late (COVID-19 didn't reach Colombia until 2020)!

To this day, some consoles are difficult to purchase on the market; although I’ve seen PlayStation 5s in stores, the Xbox Series X|S is a console I’ve yet to see. More importantly, however, one of the trends that has yet to hit Colombia is VR. Unless you’re willing to buy from online stores (such as Amazon), VR consoles are unattainable. And although I’d love to jump in and get myself an Oculus Quest 2, my only option is to purchase it through an online retailer, pay the shipping and tax prices, and pay the lack of regional pricing, making the VR an almost two minimum wage purchase.

This is all to say that when growing up in a third-world country, videogaming is a hobby for the rich. I've had friends since then that, much like me, couldn't afford titles that they were extremely excited for. And often, with newer gamers I meet, they like games that were famous years prior and have lost their touch in other, more developed countries. Videogaming is a growing trend, but it's a far cry from how prominent it is in other countries and is strictly based on pricing. I was shocked at the countless games that seemed phenomenal that I'd missed because they hadn't hit their peak of fame yet in Colombia; most importantly, videogaming in a third-world country is a desolating hobby.