Game prices in Australia
Occasionally I wonder just why I buy games at all in Australia. For whatever reason there seems to be some publisher-driven cartel in fixing the prices of games well above that of any other country. In Europe the excuse is that of localisation costs but in Australia that work has already been done for the UK and the US. Just now I quite fancied picking up an older RTS game I didn’t get around to playing, EA’s C&C Red Alert 3. This came out in January so really you’d expect it to be a bit cheaper now right?
Well, it’s US$49.99 on Steam so we can rule that out. I’m not sure what’s up with Steam’s prices, they’re almost always retarded like that. If you head along to EA.com you can buy a download for US$29.99. That seems reasonable to me. I add it to my cart and go to the checkout at which point I am unceremoniously forwarded to the front of the EA store. Looking at the snappy URL I can see http://eastore.ea.com/store/eaapac/en_AU/DisplayHomePage/ThemeID.850400/ccRef.en_US, so en_AU huh? I already know where this is heading…
I have to add the game again and below and behold the game is AU$79.99. That’s the equivalent of US$68.88. Let me remind you that on the US store the game costs US$29.99. That is a mark up of 130%, that’s right, one hundred and thirty percent of the US price.
Attempting to play the devil’s advocate card to try get into their crazy corporate heads, I imagine this starts from a market position where you are selling very little in Australia. You have a minimum level of costs to operate and you’re attempting to run your business unit on a profitable basis and that means charging more for the sales volume. In most circles of business that’s exactly what happens and it’s perfectly acceptable.
However when you walk into a CD shop in London Picadilly, for example, you don’t see the prices for CDs in China sat right there next to them. Quite clearly someone who plays PC games is relatively au fait with the entire concept of the English-speaking global market in videogames. Downloading a videogame quite obviously should not cost more in Australia than it does in the US or anywhere else. After all, they have to actually resort to all sorts of crafty detection mechanisms to work out where you are in the world at all. In the videogame market, the early adopter market particularly on PC, people don’t like being taken for fools. The stupid situation with Australian game prices turns into a self fulfilling prophecy of ensuring that they continue to see very little via these mechanisms. It’s kind of hard to bemoan the roaring trade the high street retailers do in second hand games when the wholesale prices of new games is so artificially high.
So what is a gamer to do? Assuming you can’t find it in the bargain bin of EB (actually that’s a good point, I should check…) you’ve got a few other choices. You can buy it off ebay from somehow who has gone to the trouble of sourcing boxed copies at a competitive rate – ostensibly by importing from overseas rather than purchase through the Australian price fixing cartel. Often you can actually buy from a foreign ecommerce operator direct who are only too happy to post the game to us in Australia – for many games even Amazon will do this. Although of course there are many games that the publishers have denied that. EA is one of those. I know because I tried. It was actually a bargain $27.99 on Amazon.com, it let me put the game into my basket but right at the end of the checkout process it says “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 cannot be shipped to the selected address.” Nice.
It’s not unreasonable to suggest that at this point you might be pretty annoyed. Annoyed enough to go ahead and type “Red Alert 3 torrent” into Google and just fucking warez the game and pay nothing. Christ it’s probably less of a ballache than an optical disk with it insisting on being in the drive etc etc. That said, I work in the industry and have a moral aversion to doing this. So what that means is in my case I just shrug and say – you know what? I can’t be arsed. There’s plenty of other games.
What I don’t understand is why somebody at EA wont sort this nonsense out. There is just cannot be an argument that sorting this out would not constitute an increase in revenue. Since they’re losing a bunch of money right now I would have thought that would be useful personally. It just seems to be another case of that sort of bizarre corporate insanity that boils down from established business practices which don’t translate to the reality on the ground.
Fortunately it looks like there’s a few bargains on Steam right now so I’ll not go without.
