imprezawrx500, its not the devs that set the price, they have very limited control on the price. The publishers control RRP in AU, e.g. The people to be held responsible are: Publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft....) AU branches of publishers Big Retail (EB Games, GAME,....) AU consumers (for buying at such a high price, hence giving the above stakeholders no reason to reduce prices). Buy from steam or buy from overseas (not pirate, pirating doesn't help) - basically skip the retail stores until they see all the sales from the competition and adjust their prices to meet the free market prices. you can get your games via steam, ebay, zest, play-asia etc. Its all legitimate and often a lot cheaper.

Excellent Article. I used to have a decent collection of pirated games, but a year ago when I realised how damaging it is to developers, I literally destroyed the entire pirated collection, and actually went and bought legitimate copies of the games that were dear to me. Since that day I've been buying the games I really want and ignoring the others. I end up getting less games, but I make sure they are good ones. You end up wasting less time playing crap games, and you actually support the developers of the good games. Piracy is literally biting the hand that feeds you. If there is a game you really like, then pirating it is like saying to the developers: "I hope you lose your jobs and never make a game like this again". Quite Literally. It is a serious crime it affects the jobs and lives of developers and the games that we will eventually be able to play. Just because its easy to pirate and some other people do it, it definitely does not make it OK. It is against the law and is a punishable crime. stop doing it.

excellent article. we need more like this. I'm a software engineering student in my 4th year planning to get into the game dev industry myself, however there is almost nothing in sydney (or its very hard to find) besides programming lame mobile phone games. regarding the following quotes: "We're trying to get more students enrolled in the programming places, where the real shortage is." & "Getting more skilled graduates is key for the Aussie industry's development." if there is such a shortage, please tell me this: where do I sign up? i.e. another big problem is that it is so hard for students/graduates to find game development jobs...

I sent an email to EB about this: I found this article about how a lot of Australian gamers are starting to import their games because it is cheaper, and I think it would be of GREAT interest to your upper management to read through some of the comments: http://au.gamespot.com/features/6196976/index.html?tag=topslot;img;1 I think that you should start to rethink your pricing strategy because the web is becoming more ubiquitous, the gaming market is becoming bigger, but this market is moving closer and closer to a free market situation, which means more potential loss for EB and for its (now lost) customers. Most people tend to agree that they would prefer to buy from local retailers, but the ridiculously high prices force us not to. ---- and here is the response: ---- Thanks for your email however in Australia the base cost price of a product is determined by the Vendor of the product; in almost all cases these Vendors report back to a parent company, usually based in the US, Europe or Japan. Theses parent companies in most cases further set country pricing structures. This is out of EB Games control and in a lot of cases out of the Australian Vendors control as well. EB Games recommends contacting the Australian vendor of the product in question for further clarification.