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Hey Americans, want to go to the cinema in Australia? Admittedly this is 'Gold Class', where there are only 30 recliner chairs in the cinema, with food and drink service, but it's still $40 per ticket...
I may be getting stuck with a $9000 tax bill this year, new accountant pending. Turns out I earned a lot more money in this past financial year that I knew of. However, I paid tax on every penny. Sometimes more than was necessary. So if I work more to pay off my debts, I therefore get taxed harder? So is the lesson I should work less and pay off my loans slower? I'm not quite understanding how this world works am I? I just want to work my ass off to be debt free so I can save to start a small business. That's never going to happen if I get slammed with a tax bill every year though. Cash jobs anyone?
It’s only March, but 2013 is proving to be a monstrous year for the gaming world, and not just because Sony has finally unveiled their first addition to the Next Generation of consoles, the predictably-named PlayStation 4. Well, almost unveiled - does a controller count as a console reveal? Isn't there something better to look forward to?
Yes, it was a lackluster event from the team at Sony HQ, and with the same improvement on graphics that PC gamers have been enjoying for years, a touch pad with questionable usability and social network integration that will see all of our Facebook news feeds flooded with boring Call of Duty kill streak videos, the PS4 has not excited even the most avid of Sony fanboys. However, we may have at least one thing to get a little giddy about, and that is the price.
Sony has not released an official price point just yet, and since the console’s prospective release date isn’t until November-ish, they probably won’t for quite some time. Developers like to plant seeds of curiosity within their target markets and water it with information leaks to see if they are growing a rare flower worthy of a $1,000 price tag, or a particularly unpleasant cactus that only cactus fanatics would knowingly hand over $300 for. But of course, no price tag does not mean no speculation.
Australian video game retail giant EB Games has come under a little bit of Internet scrutiny for advertising an exxy placeholder price of $899, and it seems only the business, not the consumers, see this for what it is - a business tactic. A ‘placeholder price’ is just a wildly excessive estimate so that customers and staff have something - even if it’s a very vague something - to work with, and that estimate has to be wildly excessive. For both the business and the consumer, it’s easier to swallow a final price that is less, not more, than originally anticipated.
And it will be less. Far less, perhaps, than consumers are expecting.
Compared to our foreign gaming companions, Australians have relentlessly battled against relentlessly exorbitant prices on technology product, and only half-jokingly, we have aptly named those price hikes the ‘Australia Tax’. Back when the Australian dollar was heedlessly struggling to catch up to the American one, the monstrous price disparity on all imported products - including video games - kind of, sort of, made sense. When 1USD was fetching a whopping .55AUD, it made sense that a $60 game in the United States was $110 in Australia. We are few of us Australians economists, but the math looked right, and so it was okay.
Then the Global Financial Crisis struck in 2008 and the debt ceiling in the US of A was so high that it was practically open-air. The AUD skyrocketed to level with the USD, and we, the public, furiously scribbled down our long division, carrying the ones and adding the zeroes, to conclude that video game prices should drop accordingly. But they didn’t.
The social science of why is fairly convoluted, I expect, but here is the layman’s version that I came up with.
Those maps show population densities.
Australia is an island of 22 million people, marred by a dirty, great, uninhabitable desert right in the middle, forcing 70% of the country’s population into about 1% of its land mass.
The United States is about 20% larger, has a population of 313 million people, and a heck of a lot more inhabitable land.
Logistically, this is messy. A marketing billboard in the United States will reach about 12 people to every 1 that the same billboard would reach in Australia. We are also surrounded by water, so every product we want and don’t develop ourselves, we have to import and potentially ship across a scarcely inhabited zone to reach the denser urban areas of Perth or Brisbane or Darwin. And, to top it off, we are heavily affected by the law of supply and demand - anything we demand is generally in short supply, simply because it is harder to supply.
I have issued this argument to a number of people, and even managed to convert some, but the popularity of digital copy video games has surged over the past five years and the merits of my argument have consequently depleted. Digital video games are not privy to shipping costs and a clever company knows that marketing is largely Internet-based because the Internet cares not for population densities in the way traditional marketing tactics once did.
Admittedly, video games have dropped in price - new release titles land on shelves at an average of $79.95, now, rather than $109.95, but that does not explain why the USD has been checking in each morning at 1.02 and digital downloads are still significantly more expensive to procure in Australian than overseas. Adobe PhotoShop, as a prime example, will strut away with $1,160 of your hard-earned Australian dollars, but will only sting Americans for $850. $310 extra for digital software? Wait, what?
Luckily for us, we are an active society of gamers in Australia, and if we want something changed, we whinge and whine endlessly on forums in the vague hopes that some random, political activist is also a gamer and will endeavour to achieve change for the greater good. Also, businesses are sick of legally downloading the Adobe Creative Suite for a pretty penny more than their American counterparts, so since they pay the big tax dollars, we have them to thank for applying downward pressure on Parliament to demand change.
Last month, the House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications subpoenaed technology giants, Adobe, Apple and Microsoft to defend themselves in an inquiry into the IT pricing schemes applied to technology products sold in Australia. Given an invitation, I would most certainly dance around behind the committee, pointing and singing an audible verse of nerny-nerny-ner-ner in Microsoft, Apple and Adobe’s general direction.
Realistically, we don’t know that this inquiry will make a difference, but within days of the subpoena being issued, Adobe announced a price drop on its Cloud services to Australians. I’m taking this as a sign of things to come.
In other news, Queensland Parliament finally passed the bill amending the classification of video games to include the R18+ rating. Yay, God of War: Ascension!
