The nine-year-old console has been finally released in Brazil at an outlandish price

Nov 20, 2009 10:34 GMT  ·  By

If you live in Australia and you feel that you're being cheated by the delayed release of games and the censorship of the Australian Board, and the consequent banning of some violent titles, you don't have the right to complain about it anymore. Also, if you live in some other part of the world and feel in some way wronged when it comes to video games, you too have officially been denied the right to whine about it. No matter what your wounds and emotional scars are, they're nothing but a wood splinter stuck in your finger compared to the brutal evisceration that Sony did to Brazil.

The console market has seen a lot of price cuts, and most current-gen platforms can now be found not much above the price range of $200. But that's not something that's going on in Brazil. Sony has finally released in this South American country its console for approximately $465, or R$799. If you think that the Brazilian gamers are being ripped off, you should hold your horses for just one more second. The $465 console released by Sony isn't the PlayStation 3, but the PS2. That's right, the nine-year-old console is being sold at more than twice the price that the PS3 is being sold at everywhere else.

The reason why Sony decided to give this outrageous price to its console is a bit of a mystery. While it's true that Brazil has huge import taxes that run up to 60 percent of the item's value, it still wouldn't justify the price. Currently, a PS2 is available everywhere else for around $100, so, if you add those 60 percent and, let's say, transport to that and the catholic tax for “all things unholy,” you still wouldn't get anywhere near $450, and all you would end up with would be, at the most, a little over $200.

If Sony decided to treat this as a ground-breaking technological release hoping that Brazil had been blind to what had happened in the world in the last nine years, then it is going to have a huge shock as far as sales go. In 2006, Brazilian site UOL estimated that 80 percent of the local game market was composed of illegally imported copies, so you can be very sure that a lot of those titles are played on illegally imported and modded consoles.