[General Discussion] Spatulaocanadians must pay a premium – basically, I can already feel the heat.

Spatulaocanadians must pay a premium – basically, I can already feel the heat

Alright, something that has bugged me a little bit is recently the price of games Canadian pay vs Americans (oh shit, I can already feel the heat from a few Aussies/Zealanders/Europeans and whomever else has to pay out of their nose for video games…like $70, 80, 90, and even surpassing $100 for PS2 special edition games etc).

First things first, we know about the whole issue of the exchange rate. Currently, the Canadian dollar is worth about, on average for the past few weeks, 89.50 cents to the American dollar. So that’s a pretty good ratio – about a 90:100 exchange rate.

According to the EB Games website, most new games for the PS2 are at about the price of $49.99 USD, with cheaper third party titles at about $39.99. For the Canadian prices, most new games are selling at $59.99 CDN, and about $49.99 for more “budget” third party title, say, Okami – which is a very fun game, no doubt. If we were to take the current exchange rate, $1.11 and calculate $49.99 USD to CDN, we’d get about $55.49. This is $4.50 less than the retail price of $59.99. The currency exchange rate has only been at this level for perhaps the past 2 and a half years. Prior to that, it was about $0.65: $1.00, pretty bad for Canadians.

One of the reasons I’m guessing that the prices will remain, for the foreseeable future, at status quo is:

1) Businesses do not adjust their prices of goods at the whim of a mere foreign currency change , whether it be DVDs, TVs, and other electronic consumer goods.

2) Currency generally doesn’t go up and down dramatically enough to warrant adjustments in prices constantly. They usually only go up fractions of a cent even over a period of months.

3) With adjustments in prices, it would make estimation of revenue figures at quarterly reports difficult for the retailers and the game publishers.

4) The Canadian editions of games do come with an extra instruction guide in French. The game itself is still in the primary language, ie English. Perhaps it’s with this extra cost of printing the extra instruction book.

5) If the publisher/retailer were to adjust prices for the Canadian games to keep in check with the US currency, they would basically have to do this with all the regions selling a particular game, meaning that they’d have to adjust with the Euro and likewise the Australian Dollar and many other currencies. Failing to do so would result in price discrimination.

Even so with all these considerations, I think Canadians are still paying a slight premium, since, our copies (minus the French instruction book) are exactly the same as the US copies.

This makes me beg the question of why gamers in Europe and Aussieland get raped up the ass with astronomical prices for games. $100 AUS for a new PS2 game? I basically shit myself when I was in Brisbane gawking over the ridiculous prices. However one thing has struck me of the huge jump in price for European and Australian copies is that they are on the PAL format. I’m not familiar with the whole works of PAL, but I’m guessing that the conversion costs that developers have to transfer from NTSC to PAL are pushing the costs to the end consumer. Still, a $40 jump per unit just to convert it?

Can anyone else shed some light as to why Canadians generally have to fork out more for games (but no where near as bad as our PAL friends) than our American friends?

I really wasn’t trying to complain about prices that Canadians have to pay, comparing it to our International friends. ;___;

How ya doing, buddy?

Are the games themselves translated to say, French and German? Wow, if that's the case then I can definately see the huge adjustment in price. I just thought that the game itself would be in English, while the instruction book and packaging might come in say, German - considering that from what I've talked to various Europeans here, English is taught amongst other languages in many European schools.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Quote:

15% tax...gives me chills to think about it.

6% GST for Alberta FOR THE WIN.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.