Why are Australians paying such a premium on Video Game Prices? A few years ago it might have been understandable especially at the lows of the 2008 GFC when the Aussie dollar traded at 60 cents to the US dollar and not that great against other currencies either. It wasn’t particularly affordable to import games.
The Australian dollar is now trading over parity to the USD and yet Australians are still paying up to twice as much as what Americans pay.
It makes you wonder that the reason that we might be paying these prices is due to the physical walk-in stores that sell video games for PC and the consoles PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 have no ‘apparent’ competition. What I mean by this is that there is no perceived threat, yet.
Lack of awareness of cheaper alternatives appears to be an important factor with this gaming market problem. The average consumer can save a lot of money if they are prepared to shop around where they purchase their games, just as long as the average gaming consumer can exercise a little patience when they are purchasing a game. By patience I mean they don’t always have the burning desire to play brand new games in the very first hour or day that the game is released. They can get the same product for up to 50% off if they
shop around and wait for delivery a week later.
I’ve been a big advocate of solving all or a lot of my issues online. Only in the last year I had wisened up to the idea of importing from the UK. I have started buying from ozgameshop.com when I realised that I didn’t want to be spending 100 dollars every time I wanted to play a brand new ps3 game. For a laugh here’s a price comparison using for 4 games I pre-ordered in September 2011 against the prices JB Hi-Fi Online (who you could argue are cheaper than it’s physical stores!) are charging TODAY (23/01/2012)!
The math really speaks for itself. That’s a saving of $104.04 AUD. I'm so glad I got the Skyrim price offered at OzGameShop!
Just to be thorough and support local I did a bit of extra shopping around to see if I could buy cheap games within Australia itself and it turns out you can. Over at http://www.game-lane.com.au/ I spotted Video Game Prices for the above for games to sit between OzGameShop and JB Hi-Fi Online. You could easily find savings of 20% or more by purchasing from non chain stores online.
I read an interesting article over at Kotaku where the economics of the high Video Game Costs in Australia are discussed. Basically, in Australia we have gotten used to paying these premium prices, and there has yet to be a sufficient threat to the physical store gaming market or as I have interpreted, no major shift to the online stores to warrant the physical stores reducing prices to acceptable or competitive levels.
Please share what you do to find cheaper prices for your Video Gaming needs.
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