Region Coding, Why?

[omgwtfbbq]

bdbdbd said:

omgwtfbbq said:

Europeans I can understand getting screwed with release dates, since it generally has to be translated to 4/5 different languages.

We only speak english here, come on, show us the damn games!

@bdbdbd

1. Import market is so small (except in some rare cases such as Gyakuten Saiban 2, but they brought that on themselves) that it won't make much of a difference

2. If you import from Japan, learn to speak japanese =) People who want the localisation will pay for the localisation (again, 99% of cases)

3. ermm... why does the company care about this?

4. This seems to show a complete lack of understanding of economics. "People are importing games instead of buying them here because they cost so much. I know, let's RAISE the price to make more money!" Anyone who thinks like that needs to have their head checked.

If they didn't artificially delay games and increase prices to other countries (yes, I said ARTIFICIALLY. This is 2007. Are you saying it takes half a year to get a game from US to Australia, and costs $30? This is complete bullshit, and everybody knows it. NOTHING could delay the release that much unless it was on purpose) then there wouldn't BE any motivation for people to import games. The companies use region encoding to fix the price around the world and for no other reason. And kudos to Sony for taking region coding off their games (although they ruined this by suing the premier importer into oblivion).

 

Australia should have NTSC or its own region code to have games there earlier. It's pretty stupid to wait for translations, which are useless to you. That's what also i have to wait.

1. Importing is growing all the time. At some point it is starting to show at how many games have a retailer sold.

2. Yes, they will pay it. In fact, they will pay more from it, because part of the market is buing non-localised version.

3. Why does a company care about taxes? Why does anyone care about taxes anyway? Because taxes have to be paid. For example, if Euro goes below 1.18 USD, Wiis price without taxes in Germany (if i recall, it's 250EUR there?) is less than what it is in the US. You can't just say that "it's 300 now, because of currencies" or "retailers should pay only 10% VAT to keep price where it was". For example some car retailers from Germany used to buy cars from the finnish importer, because they got the cars cheaper from there, than from the german importer. Because of the high tax, car manufacturers compensated the tax by selling cars to finnish importers cheaper than to the german ones.

4. That's correct. You got the whole point. They have to raise prices to make profit. Retailers aren't doing charity, you know. Retailers have expenses, and at a certain point, expenses are higher than profits. Retailers order only one kind of products: profitable ones. If you sell a lot of products, you can sell them with smaller profit per unit sold, but if you don't sell much, you have to compensate with bigger profit per unit. It's as simple as that. Where does a price for a game come from. Let's see. Designing, manufacturing, marketing, logistics, manufacturers profits, retailers costs, retailers profit. For example Kesko in Finland haven't sold Nintendo stuff in it's Citymarkets in a couple of years because they didn't make enough profit from them, while SOK:s Prisma warehouses imported Nintendo stuff from NOE (unlike Kesko, who bought their localised versions from the finnish importer AMO) and sold them cheaper. Now the finnish importer didn't get any money from units sold by SOK, so they couldn't really market Nintendo products (Prismas have big market share in Finland), so this played the game for Sony and M$. Finally, by importing games to sell them cheaper, this caused harm for people who would have wanted to buy Nintendo games (they bought PS2 and Xbox games from the finnish importes and sold with same price with GC games), since importer and stores who bought games from the importer, had to have bigger profit per unit to break even (BECAUSE THEY HAD BIGGER EXPENCES PER UNIT).

1.  Funny, I could have sworn Nintendo's justification for region encoding was "well, no one really imports games anyway, so it doesn't matter"

2. Yes, of course. It does cost a bit of money to localise a game. I am sure the $30 markup on games here from US is because of the massive amounts of localisation involved in translating from English into... English...

3. If someone imports a game, they have to pay the taxes on the import. If they get around that, it's no skin off the game company's back. They don't LOSE money because someone didn't pay taxes on their game (of course, they lose the money they would have gained by exploiting a particular region

4. NO, you're not understanding the reality. When there is a cheaper alternative, the solution to your falling sales is to DROP prices, not rise them. If you are a successful business, you know this. If your games are not selling in Australia because everyone is importing them, then the solution is NOT to raise the price, the solution is to DROP the price and remove the incentive to import in the first place! If the games didn't have a $30 markup here and came out around the same time in the US, then people won't import the games! It's as simple as that, but Nintendo and MS would prefer solve the problem in a way that will allow them to continue to rip us off because we are a small and unimportant market. And since they're happy to do that, then I'm happy to chip my console (since it's perfectly legal here in Australia), and if I decide to download Super Paper Mario rather than import it now that there is no Lik-Sang, then they're losing the revenue. Well, they have no one to blame but themselves. There is NO reason why Super Paper Mario should not be released here. And there is NO reason why it should cost $100 when it finally is released.