Sony adds new games to PS3 Essentials catalogue, brings price down to Rs 999

Sony has announced that a number of games will now be sold as part of the PlayStation 3 Essentials catalogue. This means that the prices for the games have been dropped down from the typical Rs 2,499 to Rs 999. The new PlayStation 3 Essentials catalogue will be available from this month.

This is a big step forward thanks to Sony starting local replication of its games in India. This essentially lets the company avoid duties and taxes from importing games since the discs for these games will be produced in India itself.

There will be a number of games that will be released at a lower cost and these games will be released in small waves. The first wave, coming out this month, includes the God of War Collection Volume 1, God of War Collection Volume 2, God of War 3, Killzone 3, Resistance 3, Motorstorm Apocalypse, Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves, Heavy Rain Move Edition, Sports Champions and The Fight.

Nathan Drake’s second adventure is now available for Rs 999

As you can see, the games available come from all genres, such as the hack-and-slash action games from the God of War series, FPS games Killzone 3 and Resistance 3, racing game Motorstorm Apocalypse and cinematic games Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain. Sony’s got casual gamers and families covered too with Sports Champions.

According to Sony, this is a drive to offer a catalogue of more than 20 titles under the Essentials price point.

Making this new announcement, Atindriya Bose, Country Manager of Sony PlayStation said, “Such an attractive range of marquee titles at the Essentials price band will allow new gamers to easily enter the PS3 category. And what better than the summer holiday season to introduce such a large range of affordable game choices to own and add to one’s collection.”

Current-gen console games are expensive mostly because Indian game distributors have to import the games from out of the country. Because of this, the distributors have to pay the duty and taxes that are applied on software being imported. Microsoft will hopefully follow suit and kick off its local replication drive soon as well, making even Xbox 360 games available at a lower price point.

This isn’t the first time Sony has started local replication of games. The company had done the same for the PlayStation 2 a few years after the launch of the PlayStation 3. This brought the price of PS2 games from the Rs 2,000+ price point to anything between Rs 300 to Rs 1000.