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I have never personally traveled further than Australia, being based down New Zealand, and as you might have heard we always seem to get the stiff arm when it comes to pricing of technology and games. As a result of this the Australian Government is looking into the issue and invitations will be sent out to major computer and software manufacturers to defend their pricing policies down under at a Federal Parliament inquiry.
With the strength of the Australian dollar that today buys $1.045 USD for every Australian dollar, you would expect prices to at least be on par with American pricing. Well, most of the time they aren't.
MP Ed Husic welcomes the inquiry saying that “people here scratch their heads trying to work out why they get fleeced on software downloads. When the Productivity Commission asked IT companies why they charge so much for downloads, even they found the answers were not persuasive.”
Other representatives from Ubisoft and Activision put the blame on consumers still buying the ‘overpriced' games and different distribution methods to those used outside of Australia.
KitGuru says: Hopefully this inquiry results in a positive result for Australians, one that should also flow on to the UK and New Zealand.
Far as I’m aware UK is in a good spot with Pound Prices on things. They’re cheaper than their Euro Counterparts by a large margin mostly. For Australia, I’ve heard for a while that stuff is highly overpriced, surprised this didn’t happen earlier, but glad it finally did happen.
Now if the European Union started investigating why some Companies still use straight-conversion from Dollar to Euro, we could have less Euro inflated prices too… (Some Games cost 60$, 60 Euro, rather than the usual 60$/50 Euro, which even so is at least still partially inflated).