Muzman on 30/3/2016 at 19:55
Quote Posted by TannisRoot
???
They aren't doing anything illegal. Australia's average salary is almost 60% higher than the United States. It's basic supply and demand. If average income raised to Australian levels in the states, then you would observe an increase in prices of consumer goods across the board.
If Australians don't like the price they don't have to buy. If they don't buy, the price will decrease. It's not a conspiracy.
You're completely incorrect about all of this. You've got supply and demand the wrong way around for a start. Average income isn't a part of supply and demand (not directly anyway). Supply and demand is.
Second of all you can't really explain the price parity between brick & mortar stores and digital where they are not co owned with some supply and demand argument. There's fewer costs associated with digital distribution. It should have a competitive edge. Plus it's not like Valve has some fixed amount it needs to extract for the Australian market that demands prices they have now (pricing schemes they did not have initially). No, publishers fixed prices across their platforms and made Australian prices higher (or so the explanation seems to be).
This has been (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Tax) an oddity for decades: music, books, you name it. The explanation isn't always straightforward. But it seems that if not a conspiracy, it's more tradition (partly at least) to charge Australia more for media of various sorts.
No one wants price fixing and regulation, more un fixing and deregulation if anything.
icemann on 31/3/2016 at 09:25
Damn straight. Same price (when converted over to the currency of various currencies) worldwide. That's all we want.
For non digital content, factors such as freight, fuel to send etc etc all can be factored in. But when it comes to digital content there is no excuse at all, other than because "they can". And that's just not good enough in today's world.
