PSN - Unbelievable price differences.

[Aanorith]

Living in Sweden, I have always been painfully aware of the huge price difference between Sweden and America. My wife is american, having lived there I also enjoyed your fantastic prices. 40-60$ AAA games vs 1110$ woosh.

I used to be naive, thinking that the leap towards a more digital game purchased world would benefit us in Europe. This is really old news to most of you I am sure. It really just boils down to, hey maybe I sould give Persona 4 Golden a try, I've seen a lot of positive reviews for that game. US PSN; 20$, Swedish PSN, 52,43$.

Whyyyyyyyy ._.

 

[Elfgore]

This may be wrong, I'd look it up but I lack the time. I think it has something to do with the currency exchange rate or something. They don't properly adjust the prices or something, but that's just what I heard. It could just be Sony screwing people.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

I really don't get why they hose everyone who isn't in North America. Especially when it's games that are coming from Japan and should be localized directly to your language and region instead of being translated from Japanese to English and then to Swedish, French, German, UK English, etc. It can't be just because translating costs money, because Australia and the UK get hit with the price gouging even when they get the same American English localization for a game. It can't be tariffs because that would harm consumers more than it would protect domestic game publishers.

I'd say you should boycott the games with those ridiculous markups, but then the publishers will see it as an uninterested market and stop localizing many games in Europe altogether. I heard a while ago some Australian consumer group is trying to fight this, so hopefully someday they won't charge you guys twice as much. (But with the way game budgets are ballooning, they might just start charging $100 a game here in the States to cover the budget and tell everyone else that the prices are fair now.)

This may be wrong, I'd look it up but I lack the time. I think it has something to do with the currency exchange rate or something. They don't properly adjust the prices or something, but that's just what I heard. It could just be Sony screwing people.

MANY companies are so greedy and lazy, they just switch the currency symbol without converting the numbers next to it. Funny enough, they only do that when they're the ones benefiting off that practice. Even when they do follow exchange rates, they then jack it up by 30-50% because where else can you get a PS4 or a copy of Persona without spending as much importing them.

 

[Voulan]

Tell me about it. Here in New Zealand I went to look at the price for the Skyrim DLC Dawnguard, and the price listed is $35. Seriously? In America that's half the price of the whole game. If you'd wanted to buy the full game and DLC set, you're looking at a whopping $165.

Meanwhile a friend paid for the season pass of BL2 for me to play together. The price? $60. I kid you not. So when Gearbox started releasing DLC not part of the season pass, you can bet that I was pretty furious.

The best part is that most of the time, the New Zealand dollar is worth more than US dollars. So we're spending triple the price for no reason. And it's digital, so there's no excuse.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Ps3 is region free. Just make a US psn and buy psn cards online (they email you the pin instantly) and buy the games off of the US psn. I do that with Japanese games that will never get localized, they work fine.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

This may be wrong, I'd look it up but I lack the time. I think it has something to do with the currency exchange rate or something. They don't properly adjust the prices or something, but that's just what I heard. It could just be Sony screwing people.

Back before the economic crisis of '08 there was only a .1 or .2 difference in the worth of Euro and USD (You got about 10 SEK for a Euro and 8-8,5 for a USD) and it was thus relatively easy to just convert the USD price of goods to Euro. After the economic crisis the difference is closer to .3 or .4 (you get a Euro for 9 SEK, but a USD for 6 SEK). This is part of the explanation, because the practice of just changing the symbol before the price hasn't changed.

But more importantly, Sweden has a 25% VAT (25% of base price, 20% of total price) which is far higher than the US VAT and in general VAT is higher in the EU than it is in the US, hence some of the mark up. It isn't a mark-up that the producer or distributor wants to gouge from you, but rather money that the state wants to get its hands on.

 

[Sack of Cheese]

Ps3 is region free. Just make a US psn and buy psn cards online (they email you the pin instantly) and buy the games off of the US psn. I do that with Japanese games that will never get localized, they work fine.

Any particular site? There's a PS2 classics on the US store that I would like.

If you mean PSN cards, you can just use Amazon.com.
In the address part instead of your current location, just use an American address, preferably a hotel or something. Although sometimes the credit card company will decline the transaction if they find out the address is not within the country.

If you don't wish to go through all the trouble, just buy the credit on play-asia. It's a bit more pricey though.

 

[SGT_Noobnuts]

It's especially bad in Australia since most AAA games that are released hard copy are worth $100!

And the really big releases for games like the latest Call of Duty and GTAV when they are just released cost $110!!!

I was wondering why the Americans were complaining about paying $60 full price for a game until I discovered the true price differences between the two of them!

Which I find to be very irritating if I get a game that I don't want