Ka-pi96 said:
I always do forget that you guys pay tax after the base price while we have it included. You should move to one of those tax free states, I know the US has some does Canada too? Although new digital games can be £55-60 here. So we're still getting screwed over by publishers. It's just our physical retailers are highly competitive and always sell below RRP. Even Steam (while certainly better than PSN/XBL for digital prices) is sometimes undercut by physical retailers here, even if they're just selling a box with a Steam code in it I don't know how much of a factor price would have been in Japan, would be interesting though like you said. I also do know however that Japanese used game prices are really cheap (dunno about US prices, but definitely cheaper than UK used game prices). So the huge disparity between used and new prices probably doesn't help either. And FYI I agree in principle with the sell at a lower price in order to have higher total sales, however I think that should be worldwide rather than restricted to specific regions. Like, if they can afford to sell a game at one price in one country, then surely they should be able to afford to sell it at that price in other countries too. |
Alberta has the lowest sales taxes at 5%, so I could probably save a lot of money there. 
A while ago people were talking about how digital is going to be so much cheaper but it never came to be because people were fine with just spending $60-80 on games. Maybe things will change in the future but I kind of doubt it.
Used games are a bit of a rollercoaster here, last gen games are really cheap but newer games and N64 and before are pretty expensive. Everytime I go out and buy carts for the SNES I just go for the Japanese versions to save money 
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At the end of the day, it all depends on how they can maximize profit. In some cases, your only choice is to buy via the US (or whatever the default is) store because I suppose it's not worth it to set up a regional store.
