Amazon’s offering in the video game sector has been popular around the world. It offers free PC games or in-game content for popular games provided you have an Amazon Prime subscription. Prime Gaming had a robust growth of almost 120 million in two years – figures which are quite jaw-dropping for any investor in the gaming industry. With the onset of COVID, most people were cooped up inside their homes, searching for a desperate getaway – something which they found in gaming, which pushed the demand for all gaming services/products beyond imagination. It seems that Amazon might be trying the grounds for the expansion of its Prime Gaming service to other countries – the most notable being India.
When Prime Gaming launched in 2011, India was not among the list of countries that had access to the service. Essentially, if you were in India and were an Amazon Prime subscriber, a lot of benefits including Prime Gaming were not included with your subscription. Most people attributed the reason for not including the service to poor numbers in the PC/console gaming sphere as well as the price of Prime subscriptions being very low (for comparison, a Prime subscription costs $139 in the US for annual subscribers while its cost in India is 1499 INR – which comes to around $18.5). The price argument didn’t pan out keeping the purchase-power parity in mind, however lower projected users might have been a reason for keeping it out of reach of Indian users.
The addition of India to the number of regions being serviced by Prime Gaming might look weird. Amazon has just pulled back three of its ventures in the country – its education tech business, its food delivery service, and a wholesale e-commerce website. Despite repeated efforts, Amazon has failed to make positive margins in India – the main reason being cut-throat competition for a slice of the e-commerce pie. Considering the fact that Prime Gaming was never projected to have many users in India anyways, making the service available would be a surprising move. How long the service remains available for use is yet another thing to ponder about.
There might still be changes left to be done on Amazon’s side as clicking the links on the Prime Gaming India page redirects to the Amazon Gaming page, where it shows that the country is not supported. This might indicate that the launch of the service in the country might have leaked out earlier than the actual launch date. There hasn’t been any announcement from Amazon about the availability of the service as of yet, leading to further speculation about whether it was an intended change or not.