Buying digitally downloadable game titles from Amazon store when you are not in US

Few days ago, D4R (that’s his nickname btw), a guy I know from Gamer.lk and Facebook posted on Facebook about an Amazon deal for Max Payne 3. The game was on sale for just $14.99. We all know that Max Payne 3 came out only a few months ago and $15 price tag was too good to be true. The regular price is $39.99 on Steam.

I don't like 3rd person shooters that much, so naturally I didn't have much interested in buying this particular game. But there was an interesting thing about this post. Both D4 and I don't live in the US. Amazon don't sell these outside of US either. But he was telling me that if I used a US postal address as the billing address, I would be fine.

I wanted to try it out, you know, because it might come in handy some day. For example, Crysis 3 is being sold for a really high price here in Japan, and if I can grab it off Amazon (especially off a deal), I believe the price will be much reasonable. I was planning to preorder it when I visited Sri Lanka last December, but unfortunately EA does not let people pre-order AAA titles on the Indian EA Store anymore because the pricing is about 1/3 compared to US pricing.

Anyways, back on the topic. I had an Amazon account that I had made few years back but it didn’t have an address nor a credit card. First, I made my password (much) stronger, because I was going to add sensitive information. Then I added my Japanese VISA credit card and then I added a US address. Well, it is not exactly a US address. It’s part Japanese and part US. They only check for the state and the zip code. I made the mistake of adding a New York address. That would add a consumption tax to your grand total.

Basically skip the following states: CA (California), KS (Kansas), KY (Kentucky), ND (North Dakota), NY (New York), PA (Pennsylvania), TX (Texas) and WA (Washington).

This is the title I bought. I am posting a screenshot in case the link doesn’t work.

Playing Crysis 2

I bought the game off EA store when I went back to Sri Lanka. It is cheap over there. About 4 times cheaper than here in Japan. Anyways, I played through the Campaign and it was fun. It was kinda lonely though, as I was the only one with a nanosuit. The game is playing very well on the HD5870 but it is DX9. I wonder what sort of performance drop we will see with DX11. Doesn’t matter. We don’t have to apply it I suppose.

I recorded a few videos of the campaign as well as multiplayer games and uploaded to youtube (Love this internet connection!). Check them out below. (You can scroll through the list using the arrows)

These days Suresh and I are playing multiplayer together. Too bad we cannot set it so that we always are on the same team. Doesn’t matter. Here are the stats so far. I don’t have all the stuff unlocked at the moment. I am playing with the Marshall these days. It is fun playing with a shotgun. Heck, it improves the accuracy. XD