Poll: Games prices in Australia
- Thread starter Luke Cartner
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Bullshit. Lemme see a different price for Serbia where the standard is much lower and the game price is higher (with no real chance on 'deals' outside places like Steam). They're just slamming a higher price on places where they can get away with it, they're not at all adapting prices to different markets.Cronq said:
Edit: Did a little more research, and so editing out a mistake.Luke Cartner said:
Price fixing is illegal in most capitalist countries for most goods. It's illegal in the US as well. The problem is you'd have to prove there is an agreement to charge that price in order to accuse the companies of price fixing. If Bungie, EA, and Epic got together and all decided to charge $100 AUS, then yeah, you've got price fixing. If EA did it, so Bungie followed suit, and then Epic did it too, and they never talked about it, then it's not price fixing. So there's two ways it could be happening, and I doubt anyone could bring a suit against any of the companies and prove they were fixing prices.
Cartels usually require few suppliers of a product to be effective, and there are a -lot- of developers out there, which is a strike against the idea of the companies colluding on prices. It doesn't disprove anything, but nothing's proven, either. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some collusion.
I pay more for games and I've been doing so for quite some time. Have you been to NZ? Bet you won't take the bullshit we take.
This is not a request to pity me/us, but to simply acknowledge that someone else has it even worse.
I've gotten used to it, over-priced or not.
This is not a request to pity me/us, but to simply acknowledge that someone else has it even worse.
I've gotten used to it, over-priced or not.
...except that they can't actually get away with charging that price in Serbia, so 95% of the people here pirate the games and only 5% (if even that much) is actually sold legallythedoclc said:
So no, really, no offense, but from no argument are they doin' it rite
i would but i know im being ripped off abit. but ive moved away from game stores and now buy online and from steam. like i bought assassins creed collectors edition plus postaged and i think it only cost 125.
but what i still dont understand is that even online game prices seem high. like the aussie and us dollar where like the same but on steam id still pay 80 dollars for a game even though on the us store its only 50.
why is that?
but if i remember correctly ive always been paying like 90 -100 for a game. for like the past 15 years. maybe my memory is just wrong.
but what i still dont understand is that even online game prices seem high. like the aussie and us dollar where like the same but on steam id still pay 80 dollars for a game even though on the us store its only 50.
why is that?
but if i remember correctly ive always been paying like 90 -100 for a game. for like the past 15 years. maybe my memory is just wrong.
You're setting yourself up to know their business better than they do. That seems unlikely. A company is going to set the price they believe will net them the highest net profit, not the highest profit per unit. If they're charging a price which they believe reflects the market (black and legit) in Serbia, they're adjusting for a market, and your statement is self-contradictory.Vrach said:...except that they can't actually get away with charging that price in Serbia, so 95% of the people here pirate the games and only 5% (if even that much) is actually sold legallythedoclc said:
So no, really, no offense, but from no argument are they doin' it rite
"They're just slamming a higher price on places where they can get away with it, they're not at all adapting prices to different markets."
If you think they're setting the wrong price point, that's fine (again: do you -really- know their business better than they do?), but that still means they're -trying- to adjust to that market.
Regarding the OP's question, that sucks for Australia. I wouldn't pay $120 AUS at the current exchange rate for anything, well, except maybe the next Mass Effect. (Damn you, Bioware!) Video games just don't have that much utility to me, even though I own a few hundred of them collected over quite a number of years. Prices would have to drop a lot before I'd decide the money wasn't better spent on any of the other things I do for fun.
australian prices are horrible and its not just games its everything (from jeans to tvs), i mean if it has gotten bad enough that every news channel has done at least 1 article on how its cheaper to buy online thats gotta say something, on the plus side if more and more people stop using stores and go online, store will have to lower there prices or go out of business. cuz currently its cheaper to buy good/decent brand items over seas and pay for shipping then it is to buy the cheap and nasty here
Don't think you're understanding me here mate. I know a number of people here - personal friends, friends of friends, local forums, uni colleagues - none of them actually buy games beyond what they "have" to buy (ie. 1-2 MMOs and perhaps an online FPS).thedoclc said:
I've done a quick calculation in another thread. The equivalent to buying a game that would normally cost about 60$ in Serbia would be paying over 300$ for it in UK/US, standard taken into consideration (which if you're still gonna be telling me is a price adaptation with a straight face, I'll only be able to assume you're trolling cause the poll here shows most people wouldn't even pay 120$ for one). Buying a 100$ game is to a lot of people a third of a month's salary or so around here.
I'm not claiming I know their business better than they do. I'm claiming they're ignoring the market entirely. Not adapting - ignoring. Simply deeming it not worth the bother and then still yammering on when they see a torrent and the number of people getting their hands on it. Throwing around claims like "30% of PC game sales are lost to pirates" when they're ignoring a huge part of their market.
Now if you think it's better to lose 30% (or whatever the real number is) to pirates but manage to sell a few of those overpriced games, well... kudos to you, hope you never end up handling any serious financial situations. I think most people on the other hand would agree that adapting the price to something reasonable (considering that your investment in extra copies for that market is virtually nonexistent, especially with the current availability of digital distribution), would net you a much higher profit.
It's not something unprecedented - to go to a movie theatre here, it'll cost you about 3.5 euros at most (there's deals to even cut that in half). In UK, you'd pay 12 euros for the same thing. Now, do you think the movie industry doesn't know what they're doing? Or could it be that the games industry is actually just ignoring a potential market?
I understand you. I just disagree. I'll discuss the points one at a time. By the way, the situation is similar here in Mexico. Most people can't afford video games; they're the purview of the rich and of foreigners (mostly Americans, like myself). The big companies don't ignore the market, but they treat it in a way to maximize their profits and charge $1000 MXN (about $83 USD) for a new game. Some of that is import tax.Vrach said:
The first problem is that your calculation is based on how much of a person's income the item costs, which is not how a company accounts. A company simply counts up how much currency they're getting for their product, not how much of a person's income that is. If the people of Serbia have to spend a third of an average worker's income for a game, then they're not the target market, not when there are others who will pay it. In other words, if I sell a product and can sell it for a fifty dollar profit to a person with more money, or lower the price to only twenty dollars so someone else can buy it, I'd sell it for more.
The average cost per unit of a product has a U-shaped curve, where at first economies of scale work for you to lower how much a unit costs, but then work against you when economies of scale turn against you. For example, if I build cars, my first car costs a damn fortune (factory, workers, design, research, etc, etc), but the more cars I build, the more I can spread out those costs. However, if I overproduce, I need to pay more for supplies (as I'm driving up demand for my raw materials), pay more managers, pay workers overtime, replace machines faster, etc. So eventually the average cost per unit goes up.
That means at some point, companies are going to see production of physical copies of their games start to cost them more on average. They'll cut off production of physical copies when they feel that they're going to wind up paying more than they'll make (or production capacities are met), while selling them where they think their margins will be best.
As for digital distribution, there's a big obstacle to charging less in Serbia. In the case of movie theaters, the theaters act as a physical outlet for the media. If it's profitable to sell a 3.5 Euro ticket for a movie, they will - it maximizes profit and digital distribution is indeed cheap. That 3.5 Euro ticket doesn't do -anything- to sales in France for 12 Euros or in New York for $9 USD because the theater in Serbia requires you are physically in Serbia to take advantage of the low price. The same is true here in Mexico; the theater I go to in Guadalajara costs me less than $5 USD after the exchange and is much, much nicer than the ones back in NYC. This doesn't hurt sales in NYC because only people in Guadalajara can take advantage of the cinema.
However, if I were buying software over the internet, and I could buy it dirt cheap in Serbia, how long do you think it would take me to get a proxy server in Serbia? Offering a cheap alternative to Serbians would open up a means by which consumers paying the higher price could dodge that high price. And they would. Hell, I'd do it. So while they may be opening up a new market with a much smaller margin, it would be creating a hole where their customers who -can- pay full price don't have to. It'd be sacrificing the high margin they make when charging Americans, Australians, Western Europeans, etc, a higher price on Steam. It would be as if I offered everyone from one side of town a seat at a restaurant for half price - and then asked you which side of town you were from.
"hope you never end up handling any serious financial situations." - please skip the insults.
If I were a company offering a digital product, I would not want to offer a cheaper digital distribution for a product to people in one region versus another. If I did, I'd lose my shirt when everyone and their brother online pretended to be from that region. I could charge less for a physical product or service in a different region, since only people in that region and a small group who are traveling internationally can take advantage of the price difference.
First off, lemme just be clear on this again, the market is not Serbia. It's not one country in the middle of fucking nowhere. It's a really big part of the market, though I don't want to blurt out a percentage point as that'll just steer the discussion onto "lol x%, you're way off".
You do realise that the system you're saying couldn't work already works? In fact, it's what this thread is kinda about in the first place - Aussies paying one price, Americans paying another. But Serbians (and all the other countries in the same bundle) paying a third price is... impossible? Creates loopholes? How exactly? I really don't get where you're coming from on this one.
Ehm, if using a proxy is such a viable option, how come Aussies are buying their games for 120$ on Steam if they could lie about where they're from and get the game cheaper? Why aren't they dodging that price when it's more expensive for them?thedoclc said:
You do realise that the system you're saying couldn't work already works? In fact, it's what this thread is kinda about in the first place - Aussies paying one price, Americans paying another. But Serbians (and all the other countries in the same bundle) paying a third price is... impossible? Creates loopholes? How exactly? I really don't get where you're coming from on this one.