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None of these scenarios make any sense
All I can do during this whole sort of scenario, every time it happens, is just scream and scream. It doesn’t make sense nothing about this makes sense. All that happens is that everybody gets mad and feels attacked.
Australians feel attacked because, without any attempt to hide it, a company slaps them with an artificial surcharge that has absolutely no basis in reality, for a digital product that doesn’t actually exist. They’ve seen behind the curtain, and there’s no magic: just a giant middle finger.
Meanwhile, many players choose to respond in the worst possible way: attacking community reps and publisher social media accounts directly, as if they’re even remotely responsible for setting the prices. Do you think they enjoy reading hundreds of hours of negative feedback? I can still remember how I felt when I was working at a petrol station, back in my university days — right at the time oil prices started to spike — and people would come in and directly abuse me, personally, about the price of petrol. Yeah, I just woke up this morning and decided petrol should cost $1.40. Thanks for your feedback!
No, this is nonsense. Do you really think the Australian arm of your favourite publisher dictates the pricing structure locally? They’d love it if the games were priced more reasonably, because then they’d have something great to talk about instead of having to be constantly defensive and apologetic. They can’t ever speak up and say “No, these people overseas did it”, because that’s not how being part of a Large Corporation works.
What happens now?
Now we get The Silence. You’ll see this over and over again from big publishers: when something happens to which they can’t really answer without possibly upsetting somebody — their shareholders, their business partners, themselves by admission of guilt — they say nothing. They say nothing and the issue goes away, borne on the winds of a relentless 24/7 gaming news cycle.
You can read more about The Silence in this great article by John Walker. It happens all the time, and it’s exactly what has happened in every single sudden price rise to date. Publisher says nothing, issue goes away. End of story.
(Side note: Ubisoft’s community rep actually broke The Silence on the Watch Dogs price rise in March, which was incredibly interesting. As detailed in this Kotaku article, they claimed that the company was restricted to European pricing because they were part of the European business group and had to deal in that currency. That’s the last they had to say on the issue however, which is unfortunate.)
What can you do?
Dealing with the Australia Tax is bad enough, but having something reasonably priced dangled in front of you for months on end only to find it’s suddenly shot up in price closer to launch is cruel, unreasonable, and unacceptable.
If you’re buying a game on PC, please don’t buy games at these prices. While the shift towards digital is inexorable, and prices will eventually reach reasonable levels, at the moment all you can do is vote with your wallet. Use sites like Green Man Gaming (we are a referral partner) or GamersGate if you want to buy through official key sellers, or pretend to be in the USA — it’s not hard, here’s a guide — and buy from Amazon instead, where the prices are pretty good. You might find a cheaper deal at a CD key site, but as always, use those at your own risk.
Alternatively, just wait for a sale. Everybody’s doing it. But whatever you do, don’t pay these prices — it’s trivial to pay less, so please do it. The more people that refuse to pay these prices, the stronger the message.
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
, and good luck with all of this.
