Videogame Shopping in Jeddah

For the longest time, retailers in Jeddah have had their customers change in numbers drastically due to a significant change in prices in digital stores. As gamers, we didn't feel the need to go and buy the next released game in retail for many reasons and it is definitely more convenient to buy a game for its dollar price than pay more for it in retail from a local store. Aside from that, there is almost no information about local stores and the staff in these stores aren't really the most helpful bunch.

To that effect, +Ahmed Jadaa and I wrote an entire guide to shopping for videogames in Jeddah in order to fill the void of information. You can find the full guide published on Jeddah Blog, over here. We designed this whole matrix to rate the stores against one another and we tried to cover all the players in the local market. We're very happy with ourselves so go and give it a look.

Its a bit ironic though, as Sabaa Ali, the editor of Jeddah Blog noticed that we wrote this whole guide and in the end simply ended up telling people to go with the online option. It was amusing, but it was also true. At the time that we wrote the post the best option was hands down to shop online.

All that has changed in a matter of days though, when we received a notification email from Valve that Steam would be adopting the Saudi Riyal as a currency. To us, that was not only big news, but it was life changing. Games like Fallout 4 jumped in price overnight for no reason from 90 USD to 300 Riyals (110ish USD). This jump and how sudden it was outlined a number of weaknesses in the system that we came up with before and a few areas that we ignored in our little examination. The recent increased vigilance of local authorities in banning certain games and removing them from retail locations also factors into this overall environment.

Fuck you world, and your constantly changing nature.

As a result, we're actually working on a new matrix for videogame shopping in Jeddah, or to be more precise a couple of matrices to help us understanding now with the change that took place on Steam and might take place on other platforms. We'll be giving online shopping a more detailed examination taking into account all platforms and outlets as best we can and then comparing them to retail stores.

But it should be noted that we do not discredit the whole price changing policy on Steam, or at least we don't yet. There already seem to be opportunities for indie titles with already low prices to get even lower prices than their normal range where some titles used to go for about 75 SR have gone down to 35 SR and even certain larger games seem to have dropped in price.