If Brazil is famous for one thing, it’s laughter.
Or maybe it’s the Amazon River – that whole rainforest is quite a big deal. Or maybe it’s Pelé, legendary footballer. Or right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro? Or the Caipirinha, the national drink par excellence? Look, Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world: it has a lot to be famous for. Ask anyone out there who grew up with a video game obsession to tell you what unique, definitive Brazil is, and they’ll tell you the history of Sega Master System clone consoles and bootleg game cartridges, creative solutions for import prices that could easily cost a month’s rent. can cost. But if you ask PC gamers, it must be so huehue.
You are constantly afraid that your GPU will burn if the electricity goes out
Thiago Cancian
The Brazilian-Portuguese version of hahaha became a meme in early MMOs, and later League of Legends, as the games attracted huge numbers of Brazilian players. Huehuehue’s usage in Brazil turned into a racist, trolly way of belittling Brazilian players, although the indie developers I met in São Paulo during the Brazil International Games festival felt they got the joke.
“Those of us from Brazil, we love this,” said Leonardo Castanho, founder of the indie team behind Astrea. “We sometimes make this joke with ourselves. Latin American players use jajajaja and we laugh about that too.”
Brazil’s famous smile may have more than a little to do with the country’s competitive nature in sports and esports; Camilla Slotfeldt, founder of BitCake Studio, had mischief in her eyes when she saw the difference between huehuehue and real Brazilian laughter. “It’s very common for people to laugh when… huahua,” she said. “Huehué is more of a troll laugh, and it became a meme representing the troll side of Brazilians, where you do things in a way that you really shouldn’t, but kind of get away with it. that is huehue.”
Before going to Brazil, I thought the laugh was used more than anything to mock Portuguese-speaking players. But after speaking with Slotfeldt, who has only ever seen… huehuehue typed by other Brazilians, I realized that many of the country’s PC gamers just see it as a friendly joke. The Brazilian gaming scene really is its own pocket galaxy – partly because it doesn’t get enough attention from the rest of the world, and partly because Brazil really is. so big all by itself. What’s a little light trolling between you and 95 million fellow gamers?
Why it’s hard to get hardware
According to statistics published by Newzoo at the 2021 BIG festival, nearly half of Brazil’s population of 215 million people play games. Nearly half of those players are mobile, the rest are split between consoles (29%) and PC (24%).
The PC market may be the smallest, but based on the developers I’ve talked to, it’s largely about access, not taste. Compared to US players, Brazilian mobile gamers prefer competitive games and strategy over puzzles; the country’s most popular game is Battle Royale Free Fire. As a PC gamer in Brazil, you’re either rich enough to afford obscenely expensive hardware, or you’re most likely playing free games like CS:GO on a low-spec machine.
Or, to put it in more dramatic terms, being a PC gamer in Brazil means constantly worrying that your GPU will burn out [out] when the electricity goes out,” said Thiago Cancian, chief designer of the indie team that makes Knights of the Deep.
The last two years of GPU shortages and flipping on Ebay can give you an idea of what it’s like to buy PC hardware in Brazil. “In the US you can get a decent GPU for what, $300?” Cancian asked. “That’s more than two months’ wages for the average Brazilian. Hardware is very expensive here.”
Buying expensive technology from abroad is unrealistic for the average Brazilian, thanks to taxes and a weak exchange rate, especially against the US dollar. For years, import goods bought online were taxed 60%, so a $1,000 PC would actually cost $1,600 — or 8,000 Brazilian real. The average monthly wage, according to the Brazilian government, is about R$2,600, or $520 USD. A modest PC would cost more than three months’ wages, even if you didn’t have pesky expenses like food and rent.
For a long time, PC gaming was huge, but now a lot of young people don’t have a PC and only have phones
Camilla Slotfeldt
Despite the popularity of free-to-play games, PC gaming eventually comes back to the hardware. For the 12 million Brazilians living in favelas, owning a PC is a impossible out of reach – according to a 2021 survey, 43% of Brazilians in favelas at home have poor or no mobile internet at all. Cyber cafes provide key access to the Internet and to games.
Esports is starting to look like a viable career for a lucky few thanks to organizations like AfroGames, but so far little of the money pouring into the favela esports scene ends up in the pockets of the players. Nonprofit publication Rest of World shows how esports sponsors have seen their product sales increase in Brazil, while players are still unable to afford their own PCs. The three winners of a Free Fire tournament “collectively made no more than $6,000 – a modest sum given that the final of the tournament was broadcast by SporTv, one of the biggest sports broadcasters in Brazil,” the Rest of the World reported.
However, the situation is improving slightly for middle-class Brazilians: the government cut import taxes by 20% last year to curb inflation. But high-end hardware is still largely rare and unattainable. Until recently, Cancian’s three-man indie team worked on 10-year-old hardware. “Last week we bought the notebooks we play on here at the event, and they were cheaper,” Cancian said. “But Brazil has also been hit very hard by the Covid pandemic. It’s slowly getting better. I’m looking forward to the next decade – hardware will be more accessible and more people will be able to start developing games here. I think the hardware is as expensive as It is, is really a difficult barrier to entry.”
Camilla Slotfeldt, who spent her teenage years playing the Korean MMO Ragnarok Online, the game that made huehuehue famous, said PC gaming seems to be a bit older these days because of mobile. “For a long time, PC gaming was huge, but now a lot of young people don’t have PCs and only phones. MMOs got huge here in Brazil, and then MOBAs… [now] some households just don’t have a PC, which is really weird to me, but everyone has a phone and they basically do everything on the phone.”
Still, all the developers I spoke to gave priority to PC, seeing it as a bigger opportunity than the crowded mobile market. Despite how many players there are in Brazil, the dream is to break through to an international audience.
Made in Brazil
Cancian said that only in the last decade has Brazil overcome some of the biggest hurdles for game developers working and selling their games there. “We had a problem with piracy for a very long time, and we had the problem with purchasing power parity, and then we had the actual access to the Internet and banking,” he said. “Brazilian players on Steam are actually buying titles now, and piracy isn’t that widespread.” Leonardo Castanho reiterated that he and other developers he knows aren’t really concerned about piracy. A recent game like Monster Hunter Rise, $60 on Steam in the US, is 180 Brazilian Real, or about $33 USD.
Selling games internationally is one area where the exchange rate works out favorably for developers in Brazil, and it’s realistically the only way for indie studios to grow; there’s just no way for them to make games like Valorant and CS:GO, which are especially popular in Brazil. 2D indie games dominated the BIG festival when I visited this year, most of them, like Keylocker, made by small teams. For the developers behind those games, BIG is a stepping stone to get noticed by publishers from the US or Europe.
For Brazil’s PC gamers, what’s popular is a lot like what’s popular elsewhere. The best-selling games of June 2020 on Nuuvem, a Brazilian online store, are all household names: Civilization 6, Monster Train, Darkest Dungeon, Dark Souls. But language can be a roadblock: According to SteamSpy, only about 8,000 of Steam’s 63,000 games are available in Portuguese, and only about 5% of Brazilians speak English.
“I learned with Pokémon,” Slotfeldt said. “The games were only in English – to this day, Pokémon doesn’t actually have Portuguese. A lot of people aren’t happy about that.”
It’s an understandable frustration: Nintendo launched the Switch in Brazil in 2020, so it’s clearly interested in the population of 215 million Portuguese-speaking players, even though it’s only localized one game so far. This is one of the reasons why big competitive games have found an audience in Brazil: CS:GO, Valorant, Fortnite, League of Legends, Rainbow Six Siege, Dota 2 and Apex Legends all support Portuguese.
At the BIG festival, I spoke to young CS:GO streamer Renata Katherini, who started streaming during the pandemic to keep up with college friends. She streams at night, after her day job as an engineer, and also does commentary for a local esports league. Despite already having a career, she is interested in working full-time in esports. Those opportunities are rarer in Brazil than in the US, but again, it’s easy for outsiders to underestimate how large Brazil’s audience is. The country contains over 90% of the world’s Portuguese speakers, and streamer Alexandre “Gaules” Borba attracted more than 700,000 of them simultaneously during a CS:GO major earlier this year. That put him in the top 10 most-watched Twitch streams of all time, and he didn’t even need Drake to do it.
“Accessing games is much easier now, so I hope younger people will be more professional at playing games like Free Fire,” Katherini said. “Language is a kind of barrier for” [Brazilians watching big streamers from the US and Europe]but when the action is underway, everyone speaks the same language.”
Putting any Brazilian gamer in the esports bucket would of course be foolish – no country made up of millions of people has such limited taste. But I think Brazil’s gaming population is unique in that it’s simultaneously a monolith and a global minority – big enough to fill their own regional servers and spawn memes about their laughter, yet forced to learn English or hope so. a game gets a Portuguese translation . Without the kind of money needed to fund dozens of competing local esports teams, Brazilians gather around beloved teams like MIBR, united, as if they were Olympians on the global stage. I can see how being eternally at the mercy of game studios in a hemisphere can become entwined with that national pride to create a uniquely passionate competitive audience.
Or maybe that’s exactly what happens when everyone really loves football.
Either way, being a PC gamer in Brazil means having a dash of competitive spirit, be it playing games or creating them. “Brazilians really like competitive games. And the Brazilian audience has a tendency towards free games – that’s just the truth. Especially with mobile, they expect games to be free. It’s really a different kind of gamer,” says Slotfeldt.
“Maybe people from Brazil have a little more trouble making a game,” Castanho said. “We’re used to a battle. I’m not saying we work harder than you in the US, but when it’s harder you might run after it more.”
0 Comments