I'm getting sick of it. In short: russians get less money than europeans or americans, so we get better prices ON EVERYTHING. That's normal. Jobs in Australia on other hand are well-paid, they get more money than europeans and americans, thus they get bigger prices (altho, these are a too much). Now let's talk abour Eastern Europe having wages like russian's yet steam store prices as europeans.
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Okay, we understand that, but Steam charges more than retail stores do in Australia PLUS Australian's get a limited download quota per month so for those reasons Steams Australian pricing is just ridiculous.
Instead of buying from Steam, I can just stop by a game store on my way home and pay $50-60 for Arkham City (vs $100 on Steam) and I will be able to play it as soon as I get home. Whereas if I downloaded it, not only would I have to pay 2x more for the game, but I would also have to wait a few hours for it to download while it uses up a large portion of my download quota which I am also paying for which really isn't fair.
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In Lithuania Risen 2 cost 49.99 euros. And it is to big price , in Lithuania mid. salary about 550- 580 euros(but lot of people have even smaller ). I make preorder in Russia (digital game store) it costs me 15.34 $. If Steam make normal prices in my country I buy straight ahead from Steam.
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Ok, so now explain why kiwis have to pay the same exhorbitant prices when a) we don't make as much as an Australian, dollar for dollar, (but probably more than a Russian) doing the same job and b) the kiwi dollar buys fewer US dollars.
I'll wait. ;) Anyway, it's great that we have to pay in US dollars (Skyrim = US$89.99 = NZ$110)...but we also have ridiculous data caps and large excesses for going over; I have to factor that in to the cost of any game I buy and/or delay installing and playing it. My wife bought me RAGE and Arkham City for my birthday and I had to wait to download them so I didn't go over our data cap. We have to pay more than the US/UK for anything that physically gets imported, which I accept, but downloads? That's some cold fucking bullshit.
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The differene is: In Australia it get's censored because they don't have any age restriction above 18 or sth. like that, the highest restriction is 15+. In Germany they even censor stuff that you cannot sell publicly (you have to ask the seller if he has it and you can buy it 'under the counter').
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steam is really unfair, i dont know how much australian people earn monthly but its problem in our country too.
Imagine you earn about 200 euro (257 usd) monthly and you have to pay for skyrim 50 euro (65 usd)
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some people earn that much in 1 day, but not in our country. and its normal for people to live like this here, we all dont like how poor we live but we must. Imagine that you work 1 year to buy Ford car from 1988 for 500 euro and its normal to drive car like this here :)
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Austria is one of the wealthiest countries when it comes to per capita income (higher than the US even), but things there cost a lot more so Americans end up as the actual winners in comparison since they can buy a lot more with their money.
It's a consequence of location and size.
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wtf are you serious ?
as i know austria is in europe and its near germany,
australia is continent about 20000 km away from austria.
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Not proportionally though.
This is why Americans have the highest disposable income in the world by a huge margin even though they aren't paid the most (they're around rank 10, but it fluctuates every year). The cost of living in the US is dirt cheap and goods cost nothing compared to other developed nations, so add that and high wages/population and you have a huge market.
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it is not dirt cheap. sure we dont get half our money taken out for taxes but most of the poulation only makes at or above minumum wages, anywhere from $8-$12 an hour which is 320-480 a week where most apartments go from 750+ month for a 1 bedroom 900+ for a two bedroom if you rent a house your looking at $1200+ just for the rent then you have utilities. and goods do cost alot when you have to live on a budget.. just because theres a few people that make over 100k a year that does not mean most do. and the figues i represent is in a "suburbia". if you go to california you can double/triple those figures. a decent coffee maker costs 30-40. a food processer 50-60 food like a good steak that is just select is 10-13 a pound
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i guess it is easy to criticise a place where you dont live and try to survive in
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sure it does if your young, or single. what about those that have a family they are supporting? not everyone can just live with anyone
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If you made a family without being able to support and honorably take care of it, then you can take your misery as if it was a sheer act from karma. It's as hard as anywhere else, and despite your points it's probably easier to be done in the US.
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It's kinda a long story... but basically, it's paying to import the stuff, even though digital goods aren't imported. So, you're paying the suggested retail price, that way you can keep importing goods.
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actually i do remember reading something about this. retailers were having a whinge they couldn't compete with steam prices, and threatened to not stock publishers games unless they raised their prices on steam. damn us aussies for being so cunning.
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The retailers are getting ripped off too.
I've seen the prices they pay for a game, they're paying quite a bit more from their suppliers per item than the price of a game off the shelf would be in the USA.
They have a right to complain, but a more fair solution would be for the publishers to stop ripping them off as well.
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They actually don't. All the Australian Steam servers are supplied to Valve by ISP's who's customers have requested them (because gaming is quite a popular thing for an Australian ISP's to market online). Valve refused to pay for servers in Australia, so the only option was for ISP's to sponsor Valve and give them a few free content servers which the ISP's host themselves.
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Cant you just get yourself a middle man in another country who buys for you? I'm fairly sure there's a forumsection dedicated to that stuff here...
(if I'm for some reason not allowed to say this just delete my comment or something)
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Just because they haven't caught you yet it doesn't mean it's not against their rules.
It is against the rules. Russian users who were smuggling games across the discount barrier in exchange for money were getting their shit disabled along with the discounted "gifted" games being removed. Stop spreading misinformation.
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They were not doing it for profit (I believe, but there's no way to really judge because paypal transactions are pretty much invisible to steam), but the mass gifting got suspicious and they got taken down. I know some russian dude who didn't even do it for profit since he was friends with some guys I know and he got half his shit taken down too after they found out.
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maybe you have some discount, or check what currency is displayed in your steam client. for me google chrome cached us currency and client show eu so prices are not same.
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It would be a different Steam storefront which is saved to your browser cookies for some reason.
I'm guessing you're from Brazil?
Bioshock US - $4.99
Bioshock Brazil - $3.74
Click this link when you're finished looking at them so the Brazilian storefront gets saved as your preference so when you look at it some other time you get the same store as the Steam client.
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Check this site http://www.dlcompare.com/gameindex
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Certainly in NZ, GST isn't applicable on Steam purchases. Based on this taxation argument, and on average salaries, we should be seeing cheaper games in countries under the Southern Cross - certainly not the sort of inflated prices in the opening post.
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Same for New Zealand. This sums up my thoughts.
To say Aussies and New Zealanders earn higher wages than the US and Western Europe is ridiculously naive, and totally misinformed.
Our games are priced in USD, and the price gouging is plain for all to see.
I'm just glad Gamersgate and Green Man Gaming don't operate the same discriminatory policy.
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Ahhh - so the NZ/Aussie price gouging is related to bandwidth costs.
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Not all of it obviously, but some of it definitely is. I'm sure Steam realized they could charge even more than the added bandwidth so they just did it anyway.
But that aside, you have to keep in mind the cost/profit margins of regions like Aus/NZ, where there aren't a lot of customers and it costs more to provide them with a service. In contrast for example, the US/Can have 50 times the number of people, with higher disposable incomes, and bandwidth is far cheaper there. It only stands to reason that cheaper products makes more sense, since more people will buy and it costs Steam less to sell.
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Sorry, but I'm yet to understand the crux of your argument:
Why is bandwidth more expensive when the buyer is in Australia or New Zealand. Am I missing something?
Bandwidth is simply upload traffic charges. Steam pays the same whether the file is being downloaded by a client in Minnesota or Mombasa.
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No they don't. Keep in mind bandwidth/connection requires certain infrastructure be in place, and in many cases this infrastructure has to be in place all over the world. It costs more to set up connections to people in more remote areas. For example, wiring a city Tokyo is trivially easy and you can get absurdly high speeds for low cost, because it's densely packed and one of the most wealthy cities in the world. By contrast, wiring rural Minnesota is expensive as hell because people are far apart and far away from where data centers are.
The idea is that setting up infrastructure to Australia might cost the same amount overall as it would setting it up for the US, but the US has a much bigger population so you can split that cost up among more people. Therefore, prices go down for each individual.
A much easier way to see this is to look at how much your internet connection costs you per month and what speeds you get. Now compare that to a dense and wealthy world population center like my example of Tokyo. I guarantee you they get 10 times the speed for 1/10th of the cost.
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So Steam are carrying the cost of setting up and maintaining New Zealand and Australia's internet infrastructure?
The plot thickens.
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No they aren't.
They don't pay a cent towards broadband infrastructure in foreign countries! Their only outlay is data upload charges which will be fixed, whether a file is downloaded in Manhattan or Mandalay.
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If they don't, they're doing something really strange that I've never heard of. Because as it stands, the place I work (Amazon) has substantially higher costs when it comes to serving certain regions. For this very reason, a lot of our services are region-restricted.
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I would imagine this is related to licensing costs, distribution rights, publisher stipulations and increased back office administration charges, not the cost of installing and maintaining foreign internet hardware and infrastructure. While Amazon ship many items overseas, they will rarely ship games (digital or physical) for exactly these reasons.
If I host a website, or digital distribution service, my ISP will charge me proportionately for uploads. This will be based on the amount of data sent from my location. Data x data cost per unit = charge to me. It will NOT be segmented by location, with a separate charging level for each country data has been sent to.
Nobody from Sudan, Sweden or Senegal will come knocking on my door, cap in hand, asking for a few cents towards their upcoming fibreoptic cable rollout.
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No, that's because your ISP takes on the cost for you. The problem with running services like Amazon and Steam is that no ISP is willing to take on those costs, since you're using massive bandwidth. It is indeed variable depending on the region, you're just allowed to do so because you don't use a lot of data.
These things are not the same for everyone, especially not for major corporations and individuals.
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If that is the case, I'm willing to stand corrected, and offer my apologies for talking out of the top of my head.
That said, I don't see that the markups shown in the OP are in any way proportional to said infrastructure costs.
Also, if Steam were simply passing on infrastructure charges in a particular country, I'd expect it to be applied as a percentage markup on all games, based on either price or file size. It isn't. Some games are priced identically to their US counterparts, while the costs of others such as LA Noire, Civ 5 and Bioshock are ludicrously inflated.
I suspect the pricing is dictated as much by the publishers as Steam themselves.
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You're 100% right; it isn't proportional. Steam (and all digital retailers really) realizes that Aus is isolated enough that they can charge more and high-income enough that people can afford it.
Of course, if they're selling to South Africa, they can't really do the same. I'm sure they'd love to increase the price since it does cost them more, but they can't because people have lower incomes.
So Valve might make 100% profit off American sales, 150% of Australian sales, 50% of South African sales, and 10% off Russian ones. It's all about cost of delivery + availability of money on the part of consumers.
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NO IT IS NOT RELATED TO BANDWIDTH COSTS AT ALL!
All the Australian Steam servers are supplied to Valve by ISP's who's customers have requested them (because gaming is quite a popular thing for an Australian ISP's to market online). Valve refused to pay for servers in Australia, so the only option was for ISP's to sponsor Valve and give them a few free content servers which the ISP's host themselves.
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How are GamersGate and GMG not paying bandwidth? They host their own downloads too.
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Our wages are rubbish and our costs are high too. The average American seems to be able to have a far larger portion of their income free for luxury items. While we're getting shafted with stupidly high fuel and food prices.
GMG just don't sell a lot of stuff to our region. ME3 for $60USD - can't even see the store page from our region.
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Yeah, but that's the same reason as bandwidth. There are lots of countries where people make around $40k a year on average -- the US, Aus, some parts of Europe, etc. but none of them have 300 million people doing that. The fact that the US is the only one with so many people in one place with that kind of money means that every single company in the world sees it as the most profitable market by a huge margin. As a result, there's an absurd amount of infrastructure already in place to get goods to the US (100s of oil tankers, 1000s of shipping vessels, 10000s of planes, and so on entering US ports every week).
Because this is all in place in such large scale, costs are substantially lower. What this means is the average American might make the same amount as the average Australian or Swede, but after all necessary expenses are factored in, the American has 10 times the amount of discretionary money to spend on junk.
The key thing to take away is just the idea of economies of scale. Nothing is even close to the scale of North America, so the result is that NA has far lower prices on goods than the rest of the world. Also, the US government is pretty powerful and can obtain certain goods (like oil) at much better rates than anyone else.
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This doesn't explain why our prices are twice as high, in US dollars on a digital download store.
Oh, and it's us, the end users are paying the ridiculous bandwidth costs. My local steam content server is provided by my ISP. The only additional cost I can think of for selling into this region is the one off payment to get the game classified.
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Steam carries the same ridiculous bandwidth costs you do (they're most definitely paying your ISP for those servers), but that's beyond the point.
The level of price gouging isn't really proportional. It would make sense if you had to pay something like $10 more, but $40 more is just them realizing they can get away with charging more than they need to in order to cover cost increases.
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What, you're not joking. Damn so bad for you. Feeling so sad for you :c
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Wow and people in my country complain when the game is more than 40 eur
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Make about the same amount, but after paying taxes and living expenses the end result is a lot less. Everything in the US is way cheaper than any other developed country, so you can buy a lot more with the same income in the States.
Also, the US doesn't really have high taxes.
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Indeed, and NZ mean income is lower than in Oz. The US has a higher average disposable income level, certainly than New Zealand, and I would think Australia too.
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Yep, it's mostly just people getting screwed by not living in a more populated place. If Aus had 300m people making what they currently do, things would be a lot cheaper.
Edit: Shit, US disposable income is $10k USD more than Australia. Fuck man, you really get screwed.
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Definitely, and here New Zealand we're significantly worse off than the Aussies in terms of disposable income.
We're getting bent over down here, big time :(
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Petrol was $1.50 AUD here this morning, here is a price comparison.
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And what about the brazilian steam store. We don't have one!
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The Chasers, whom Australians here know, once tried buying EVERY item in a McDonalds - small coke, medium coke, large coke... small fries, etc...
They ended up paying 112 Australian $. I'm still debating whether or not your games are that onerous.
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There wasn't much variety at Australian McDonald's at that time, just your basic burgers, nuggets and fries. McDonald's is a multi-national fast-food chain anyway, so you can't really base your opinions off of that.
+Each individual store in Australia has their own pricing sometimes with a price difference of up to $4, so...
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Never heard Maccas having different prices. They are standardised as far as I am aware.
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According to your profile you're from Australia and you've never noticed different prices at McDonalds stores?? I'm guessing you either live somewhere remote or you've only been to 2-3 stores? Here in NSW & even in QLD each store has their own pricing. It's like that for all chain fast food/takeaway places & convenience stores/petrol stations.
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This shows the how much more we have to pay compared to other countries...
Steam Rip-offs
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Try living in NZ. We have to put up with the shit prices in the Australian steam store as well as lower wages and an even weaker currency.
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Yeah us Aussie are getting ripped off! Out dollar is better than the US, yet their prices are insainly better wtf?
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absolutely sick of it! just to name a few games
arkham city $99.95
lotr: war in the north $73.99
skyrim $89.99
bioshock 2 $49.99 (down to $12.50 for the sale)
civ 5 $89.99 (down to 44.99 for the sale)
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