Most of these action adventure, FPS, RPG and other games have NO fan base before release, but often manage to produce something great, cricket at least has a huge fan base and I believe it's complacency from the developers who seem to think that people will buy any cricket game however poor.
Sports games and action/RPG/FPS games fall into two very different buckets from a gaming perspective. To develop and sell a quality RPG/action game, the story line becomes as important as the gameplay. Comparatively, sports games don't really feature as much of a storyline. Personalized player modes (such as the My Player mode in the new generation of 2K Sports' games) are combining the two, somewhat, but the very basis of the genre is different. Therefore, you cannot really compare a sports game to one in the RPG genre.
Compared to other sports games, cricket has definitely been struggling. I was an avid and hopeful fan of cricket games back in the 90's and early 2000's, spending my parents' hard-earned cash on such tripe as CWC 2009 (the original version of which didn't even feature left-handed batsmen). There may be something inherent in the nature of the sport that prevents it from lending itself to hours of gameplay. The emergence of T20 cricket may change this but every since I got my first PSX, I've always preferred the NBA and FIFA offerings to any cricket offering (Cricket 07 is probably the only game I've spent a considerable amount of time playing).
You also underestimate the sheer size and 'potential' spending power of, say, the Indian middle classes, let alone those in other parts of the world.
I think you are over-estimating the spending power of the Indian middle class. There are unfortunately no accurate statistics available that I can find easily online, but going by a few Sony press releases, of the estimated 35.7 million PS3's sold, 30.5 million were accounted for by NA, Europe and Japan (these are of course guesstimates since I haven't found any concrete regional statistics).
With the Xbox360, the numbers are even more pronounced, with an estimated 36 million of 40 million units sold outside Asia (and excluding Japan). Empirically speaking, I've seen a few Xbox360 consoles in India but by and large India is a generation behind (PS2). The general gaming population sticks to PCs which are cheaper when you account for the fact that they can be used for non-gaming purposes as well.
Finally, even if theoretically the middle class was interested and could afford to purchase current-generation consoles, there is the fact that the network infrastructure is lacking to provide a real online experience, which you were concerned about in your opening post.
You forget that many English cricketers went to India to the IPL for one reason - MONEY.
The money is not coming from the middle class, it's coming from corporates/rich individuals and advertising. All the IPL franchises are owned by individuals that are in the upper class of society. Most of the money invested is made back, I would imagine, via endorsements and advertising. The only real avenues for the public to spend money on the IPL is through match tickets and merchandise. I have no idea how much money they make off that. The thing to understand here, though, is that the money that IPL brings in is not because the middle class is growing and earning a larger disposable income. It is because cricket is lucrative simply because it is the only sport India plays on a world-level. Since there are so many people, you don't need to sell as much per capita.
there. Even if the middle class of India constitutes only 20% of the population, that's over 200 million people straight away. Why not use programmers in India, they are cheap and there are plenty of them, is Bangalore not one of the major IT hubs of the world ?
A cheap programmer is not a good programmer. You can't create a good game just by constructing an army of cheap programmers. Besides that, you'd either be looking at a start-up or an MNC (such as EA) stepping into ask a studio to develop the game. A start-up wouldn't succeed because they wouldn't be able to get enough capital to get started because a cricket game simply isn't a sound investment. With respect to an MNC, I believe an Indian studio (Trine Games) is responsible for developing EA's next offering.
). First of all, there's the question of poor network infrastructure seriously hampering the online capabilities and secondly there's the question of ownership. Ownership may not be an issue if you're older and are actually working but if we're talking about kids from multiple families pooling their money together, that simply wouldn't work.
