Ummm... are people stupid?

*sigh*

I'm stick of people complaining about the price of things in Australia when compared to the United States.

What were you just born yesterday?

It's been like this since forever... my first memory was seeing the price of some Michael Jordan's that my Dad brought me back from American when I was rather young and they were 1/4 the price they are here.

GET OVER IT... there is a reason and no one stated it so far...

It's called population size and ultimately HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN BUY THE GAME.

If the proposed market is smaller the price has to go up because profit margins have to be the same for companies... you could KEEP complaining, but I'm sure you would complain more if companies thought 'screw Australia all together, there is no point because it only makes up .5% of our profit for the entire year, in the end the effort isn't worth it, lets just not release games at all'

Some Australian are such tight wads and think that all things are equal because of the Internet age...

In summary you sell a million copies of a game at $5 profit that is $5,000,000.

In Australia you can sell maybe ten thousand copies of the same game at $5 profit that is $50,000.

HARDLY worth it, thus, the price is jacked.

/endrant

Nobody wins when comparing (HIGH) prices with Brazil :(

Absolutely. Everyone knows that kangaroo pouches have $500 inside them. Trouble is catching the springy bastards.

The only reason that the countrys that are powerful are so powerful, they have the most people.

Look at how cheap everything is in China, why is it so cheap?

Brazil has a lot of people and things are expensive "as hell"

Actually, I did.  3 posts before yours.  It warrents saying again, though.

This isn't about other games' prices people.

Yes, I know games are bound to come late and be more expensive in Europe. There's localization, there are legal issues, taxes, warranties. It's also a smaller game market, though there's certainly room for growth - like it or not, the EU is the largest economy in the world, and has more consumers than Japan and North America combined.

I also expect games to be a bit more expensive here than in the rest of Europe, and to reach full availability later. Isolated, we're a small market, there's local representatives, there are some further legalities. Most big retailers do sell them at european prices, but we don't get anything like Amazon discounts.

News flash: this thread is not about any of this. All this makes games in Europe some 30% more expensive than in the US, and maybe another 5% around here. Guess what? Most of it is inclusion of say an average 20% VAT for the Eurozone. So that's pretty fair. It doesn't even make imports really that much worthwhile, except for the release dates.

But the game we are talking about, is budget priced in the US and full price here. That makes it a 130% price difference. Were I come from, the game sells for more than some brand new Nintendo games, and for more than when it was originally released on the Gamecube - the MSRP is actually 160% more here. This almost makes it worthy to mod the console for this game alone. And if a Freeloader ever comes out, it will most definitely be worth it.

So, if you don't think that's a ripoff, well...

in my country case. it is publishers and developer faults.

because they dont support our countries and we have to import games. we dont have official distributors ;)

Origin, that's not how things work at all.

Corporations are profit maximizing. You suggest that they make more money by selling games for higher prices in Australia, and this is true, but you also say that they only do this because $5 profit per copy isn't enough to be worthwhile. The implication here is that $5 per copy is 'worthwhile' in the US, so they don't jack up prices. This, however, is nonsense. Why wouldn't they also jack up US prices if it means more profit?

If there's anything to economic theory, then it's simply the case that gamers in other markets are willing to pay more than US gamers. Much of this is probably just differences in preferences across markets.

Taxes certainly account for some of it, though, and it should be noted that a small increase in the per-unit tax can have a larger effect on prices. Ultimately, it depends on the supply and demand curves, but consider this scenario: the supply curve has a generally negative slope, because decreasing marginal costs allow producers to break even at lower prices on larger quantities, while the demand curve (this is the special part) exists at $50-$60, drops somewhat sharply to about $70, and is then fairly flat to around $90 before falling off completely.

What happens if an increased per-unit cost (from a tax, say), which would act to shift the supply curve upwards, pushes the intersection of supply and demand to the right? If demand falls sharply but then is rather flat, a $10 tax-driven cost increase could easily result in a $30 increase in retail price.

Of course, I can't guarantee that demand works that way, but it does make some sense. We all have this conception of $50-$60 as the 'right' price for games, and I doubt that most in the US would really have a different reaction to $90 pricing than they would to $75 pricing. It's only noticed as being 'more expensive than it ought to be' - no one is driven out of the market by the $15 increase from $75 to $90 that isn't already gone when the price goes up to $75.

It's been a while since I've done formal economics, and I think I got the axes confused on my supply-demand stuff, but I think that the basic idea comes across. High demand at $60, moderate demand at $70, and moderate demand at $90.