The UAE gaming console market has achieved Dhs17.78m (around 4.8 m US$) sales from January to May this year with 4.448 million units sold according to industry studies consolidated by Jacky's Electronics.

Pro Evolution 6 is presently the best selling game in the UAE with Smack Down VS Raw 2008 ranking second.

Halo 3 and FIFA08 are in third and fourth places respectively.

Complete article

http://www.ameinfo.com/166223.html

So according to these numbers, one unit costs 17.78mDhrs / 4.48m = approximately $1........  where can I buy some units for that price (particularly PS3s, XBoxes, etc... you get the point).

 the PES series is the favourite game for most of the Arabic gamers ,,

it's really surprising that the ps3 is the market leader there :S

i thought the hacked 360 is gonna take the lead in the arabic countries

hey i just reported the news... neither i m the owner of any retail outlet chain and nor am i buying anything from there. :)

Secondly i think they r mentioning not 4.448 unit of PS3, Wii & XBOXes but may be number of games sold units... but still its extremely cheap. cheaper than the pirated versions

I think it's a mistake. UAE is quite a rich country, with GDP comparable to Finland (either per capita or for whole country). For 2007 in Fins spent 80 mln euro (120 mln USD) on games only. So 4.8 mln spent in 5 months in UAE seems pretty low. Is UAE 10x smaller than Finland even if it's not poorer?

Also I think that I have seen a poster from UAE complaining about prices. I don't think that games are cheap there.

games in the third world countries are very very expensive and the consoles too
wii here is over 400$
ps3 is over $ for the 40 gig SKU

does VGchartz count this in others?

third world seems to be coming more and more important, latin america is said to be worth $2 billion as a games market

@woopah: What is third world?

Do you know that in UAE average salary isn't lower than in Western Europe (CIA even claims it to be significatnly higher)?

@ woopah: they should, hardware sales are very high here
people were crazy about the ps and even crazier about the ps2
but i don't think they count the software sales since everyone buys the hacked copy,,

@kamil:
yes UAE is a rich country
but somehow it's counted as a third world country

Interesting, people seem relatively rich in this country. So entry pricing may be less of an issue for many (or buying multiple consoles if so desired).

Wikipedia states the country is ranked 5th (est 2007) on GDP (PPP) per capita ($55,200).