Sony has launched a Singstar Room at Trafalgar Chowk, a restaurant in Bandra, Mumbai, as a means of promoting their Singstar game for the Playstation 2. With this, Sony has also launched international Singstar games (details in the release here), to go with the localised Singstar Bollywood. The Singstar Room will feature video backdrops. Given my dislike for Karaoke and bad, out-of-tune vocals, suffice to say that this is one restaurant that I will avoid. But the singing competition might appeal to tipsy folks...so go ahead. Meanwhile, Sony doesn't even appear to have a website for Singstar Bollywood - the Singstar Game site doesn't list India as an option, but you can read about the game here. The SingstarBollywood domain appears to be up for sale. So looks like Sony doesn't have much of an Internet strategy for SingStar Bollywood. Interestingly, though, Sony has taken the Singstar Bollywood game international, with launches in Europe and the Middle East. I just checked on Ebay, and the game is priced at Rs. 1495. Readers will remember that Microsoft also has some Gaming zones for the xBox 360 - through their tie-up with Redington - though I've across more shop-in-shop spaces. Not sure of the status of the game zones, given reports of the failure of the xBox 360 in India. Of course, having someone sing in an Adidas store will drive away customers, so I don't see the Singstar taking the shop-in-shop route.
