Australia is the worlds largest Quarry, we have mining everywhere. The state of Victoria is the richest Gold area in the world, yet there is hardly any gold mining there since the gold rush in 1850s. Despite what popular belief would be that Australians live in the "outback", 60% live in coastal cities and around 85% in total live on the coast. Our government is spending somwhere around 40-50 billion dollars on a national boardband network that is set to give majority of people around 100mbps with national fibre optics network that is slowly being rolled out nation wide. My Local state government of victoria has wasted 100s of millions on a new ticketing system that hardly works and to further top that spent billions on a desaliation plant which we have to pay 3 million a day for the next 30 years to pay off, built after 10 years of drought but the year its being built we have record rain and floods as the currents in the pacifics change direction giving Peru and columbia a break from wet weather which only bought massive floods here and produced a inland tsunami effect at on stage.
On the Sports News, we have a population of around 21-22 million yet we are one of the most dominate sporting nations. Melbourne is so sports mad we play nearly every sport and we made our own sport that been around for 150 years and formed the AFL which gets the 3rd highest attendances to games (since our stadiums are big) despite being such a small population that is again fragmented between afl, soccor, rugby, basketball.....list continues.
An the Number 1 draft pick for the NBA was born in Australia and live his first 2 years here. No matter what he is playing for our national side now.
Enough of those facts here are some gaming facts
1. R&D tax credit was passed givng some major tax credits (something like 45% off, something like that) which has been written to include games development.
2. The Recomended retail price of games here is 110 USD. The cheapest you can get new games from retail on average is 89 USD. But many gamers are screwing retail and importing from hong kong and UK and are paying less than 60 USD.
3. LA Niore was mostly developed in Sydney