Bethesda Pirates

(LyndonL) #1

I can’t believe Bethesda and their money grabbing. All games around the world AFAIK (UK and US at the least) are around the $50 mark. Brink when it first was out for preorder on Steam was roughly $50 on Steam in Australia. They’ve now (same as they did with FO:NV) jacked up the price to $90. Because why? It costs more to pipe games to Australia through the internet? What a crock of crapola.

THIS is why I preordered Brink in December. I knew Bethsoft would pull this crap. I got it for the fair price. Not the “Bend over Aussies and take it” price.

Retail games in Aus are for some reason about $80-$100 - probably because a decade ago our dollar was quite weak compared to the US. I’m annoyed but can handle retail games being higher, but to then translate that price grabbing to digital games is a joke. Especially when the $AU is > than $US atm.

Bethsoft lost a FO:NV sale from me cause of jacking up the price. And these companies then have the nerve to complain about piracy when they pull these stunts. They’re the pirates. :mad:

(Bridger) #2

They are likely killing their sales. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find that there’s more piracy in Australia than in other countries as a result of such lunacy.

(SockDog) #3

If the market has sustained that price for some time their logic is probably why undercut themselves. Sucks but I can’t remember the last time games went down in price anywhere for new releases. :frowning:

(Striker92) #4

i could tell this was going to happen. i havent seen a new realese game for under $90 for years in Aust. i thought the low price on steam was a mistake to begin with lol

(Rex) #5

Wow, I am sorry for you :frowning:
But why do you blame Bethesda for it, if all games in your country are around this price?

(Cankor) #6

Can’t you just buy a hard copy on Amazon or some place like that?

(LyndonL) #7

[QUOTE=Rex;271212]Wow, I am sorry for you :frowning:
But why do you blame Bethesda for it, if all games in your country are around this price?[/QUOTE]

Because there’s retail (hard copy box - physical goods) and there’s digital distribution (costs nothing to distribute other than hosting). Not all brand new games are $90 on AU Steam. All of Valve’s games are $50 or whatever. I think THQ games are $50. Bethesda always jacks the price though. On Steam they always first list the game at the default price of $50, and then when they cotton on to “oh hey we can get more for that” they up the price.

The main culprits are EA, Activision and Bethsoft. www.steamprices.com says it all.

We can, but that’s not the point. Companies cry “Piracy is killing us” all the time, but don’t realise that they drive a good percentage of people to piracy with this crap.

(Xerxes52) #8

Sounds like Bethesda is practically begging for Australians to pirate their games.

(abrain) #9

here in holland all the games are that price and months after release. €60-€70.

(Apoc) #10

Thats some very surreal pricing…

Just out of interest how much is it in different places?

UK = £29.99 which is like 35 euros i think

(Otto) #11

Unless you want to play offline single player, its not easy to play pirate games offline.

50GBP = 57.31EUR = 81.56USD = 81.04AUD

Work arounds:

  1. Cant you change yours team accounts settings to list to America, and or, make a new steam account with it set to America? If you have some IP. trouble doing that, you can always do it via proxy… or better yet…

So today I was going to buy Magicka for four of my Gaming clan buddy’s (none of them i have ever met in real life) the problem was I couldn’t use my steam account to buy the discounted 4 pack because i already owned a copy. So what I did was transfer my money to one of the friend’s paypal account, he then used it to buy Magicka for him and distribute it as I told him to. TRUE there is some trust needed, but for us it worked perfectly.

2. Get and North American steam friend to gift to you Brink and pay him via pay-pal. I’m Canadian, I Gift games to my American friends all the time, It is a regular practice done when people trade TF2 Hats for steam games(often internationally), I don’t see it being an international issue when using this back door.

Tho you have no one here has any reason to trust me per-say, I offer my help in this matter. PM me. If you like.

(Mustkunstn1k) #12

Can’t you get it shipped in? I live in Europe where now games are also about 100$, but I’m ordering from UK which comes to about 45$.

(Ragoo) #13

[QUOTE=LyndonL;271201]Retail games in Aus are for some reason about $80-$100 - probably because a decade ago our dollar was quite weak compared to the US. I’m annoyed but can handle retail games being higher, but to then translate that price grabbing to digital games is a joke. Especially when the $AU is > than $US atm.
[/QUOTE]

I read something about this, wait a minute…

…

… here you go http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=128164&currentpage=9#162.

(DoHo) #14

Holy crap. I’m glad I got in when it was only $50. =/ I know quite a few people would instantly be turned off by that.

Hell, even I’M turned off by that, whether it was Bethesda or Splash Damage I feel kind of mad. This game doesn’t have the profile of other games to warrant that price.

$90AUD = $90US. That’s insane. It’s stupid. I honestly don’t think people are going to pay $90 unless BRINK is the new Quake, i.e. the father of future FPS. As much as the hardcore fans here want to think, that’s not going to be the case.

(Blugga) #15

Yeah it sucks.

Brink pretty much dropped from a definite pre-order (sometime in May I would have, I swear) to an “unless JB-Hi Fi has it for $59 maybe even $69 I’m afraid I won’t be getting it”.

(Striker92) #16

i knew it would be $80-100 on release, they always are. but i will be getting it then as there is no other way and ive been waiting for this game for ages. Sadly i couldnt buy it of steam when the prices were low, as my bandwidth is great enough to downlaod the whole game and still have enough ussage left for uni work :frowning:

tis my curse

(DarkangelUK) #17

[QUOTE=DoHo;271267]Holy crap. I’m glad I got in when it was only $50. =/ I know quite a few people would instantly be turned off by that.

Hell, even I’M turned off by that, whether it was Bethesda or Splash Damage I feel kind of mad. This game doesn’t have the profile of other games to warrant that price.

$90AUD = $90US. That’s insane. It’s stupid. I honestly don’t think people are going to pay $90 unless BRINK is the new Quake, i.e. the father of future FPS. As much as the hardcore fans here want to think, that’s not going to be the case.[/QUOTE]

Do you honestly that they’re picking on Australia here? No one else seems to be getting ripped off like this, so either it’s a grudge, or some other economic that’s forcing the price up beyond Beth/SD/Valves control.

(Maawdawg) #18

That definitely sucks to hear as Australia already gets the short end of the stick with their antiquated rating system (which hopefully will be changing soon) so getting price-whacked too is just a double whammy. Aussies aren’t the only ones who get hit hard by game prices. Places like Brazil and Peru get crushed by ridiculous prices as well. I would like to think there is a reason behind it rather than “we can charge this and people pay it there”.

I do know people who gift games on Steam to get around it though, and it works well for them too, as Otto described above.

(DonkeyDong) #19

Well, all I can think of is development prices are increasing because of the economy. Nothing is getting cheaper and it costs more to live. Reason why software (from what I believe) hasn’t gone down in price.

There are 2 avenues from here, and the latter is more likely. First option is to figure out how to stream line software development process by figuring out why it costs so much money. Maybe their development process is slow? Maybe they use agile or scrum? Maybe waterfall? Different processes affect how fast they are processing their code; I’m guessing waterfall just because of the fact they push out so much product, but a lot of it is buggy and they just never have time to fix it.

The 2nd option is to stop buying expensive games and by what you can. I for 1 would be happy to pay 90$ for 1 good game. But I’m constantly getting pissed at myself for spending 50$ a game that is buggy as hell. Look at Homefront, Crysis2, etc…

Spend money on what you want to and don’t grieve the developers for trying to make a profit.

(Otto) #20

If I might put out a thought out there; The online game world Has a majority of gamers mostly in North America. If I were to guess a “slightly” justifiable reason why our neighbor across the pond get bonked for more cash for the same games, even if they are digital downloads, would be the expense of investing in international servers and maintenance. Its easier to host a server in your back yard, but I could see it being more costly per capita when you have to spread them out. Tho its only a guess, and I don’t know what SD’s sever structure is going to be like…My conceptions on this hole idea could be totally out of date from what I understand of servers.

I am more in favor that somebody is just in it to gouge someone. It’s been said before, this game isn’t really marketed well(atm) nor dose it target the general public.