India’s finally going places, Microsoft bringing one of its most glamorized services to our humungous shores. Xbox Live shall be officially available in India on November 5, 2007. The company organized a pompous show to showcase the might and power of the 360, at a plush hotel located in the center of the city and yours truly had to miss his important classes just to grab a piece of this action.
The event was close to 2 hours long, cutting short on the entire thing here are the important pieces of information from today’s show. Stay tuned for there is more to come in the following days including an exclusive interview with the man of the moment himself Mr. Robbie Bach.
Live launches on November 5, 2007 and the packages are priced as follows:
Rs 350 for one month
Rs 880 for 3 months
Rs. 2200 for an entire year
(All of them are gold cards)
They also have a Halo 3 limited edition card priced at Rs 2200 and lasts for 13 months. A 1600-point card is also available, which is priced at Rs 1070. For once I actually fell this service is reasonably priced, Microsoft does offer a wide expanse of options via LIVE.
In addition to this Microsoft has also decided to launch a bunch of peripherals including the snazzy looking QWERTY input device (Rs 1600), vision camera (Rs 2040) and Wireless adaptor (Rs 4210) and headset (Rs 2620).
The entire theme of the event focused on cultural content. Microsoft is trying hard to push region exclusive content. We saw that with the release of Yuvraj Singh’s cricket and this continues with exclusive tie-ups with major Bollywood houses.
I was shown an exclusive sneak peak of Hanuman’s glorious return on the silver screen, (who needs god when we have a Spartan, is my question!) and according to their press release kit, Harman Baweja’s debut film (his dad made an awful Bollywood remake of a Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery Movie titled “The Rock”) along with Priyanka Chopra “Love Story 2050” will see exclusive content on Xbox Live, UTV another famous Bollywood production house will see its content stream down onto live.
Now comes the best bits of the event. We finally get to rent our games. An idea that Microsoft has been working on for quite some time, Seventymm has partnered with Microsoft to bring this service to our lands, imagine the possibilities, the floodgates are finally starting to open up, for this form of marketing a product is very essential for a country that is plagued with piracy. Piracy is directly related to price and this provides an effective solution to this problem and reaches out to the conservative yet economically sound middle class.
The next thing was Windows for Live that is also on its way and guess when that releases – the very same day Xbox Live is launched in India. If you own an Xbox Live account you can be more than sure to log onto Windows Live. Shadowrun (although a commercial failure) when launched in India will officially support the service of crossplay between PC and console gamers.
Here’s something off the record: The launch of Gears of War comes really close with the global release, now that’s something to think about. Tune in for further coverage of the event.
–Neelesh Mukherjee