The topic is so blatantly obvious that over 99% of the population is going to read it and go "Well duh! How else will they make their money..."
BUT!!
Quoth EB salesguy to Abbi this morning:
"Yes, Planetside WAS due for release in Australia yesterday (May 22), but the distributor decided at the last minute not to release the game until they are sure there will be a market for the game here."
quote:
A sleep deprived Where's Waisz? stammered:
I hate to say it, but if it's just you buying it, it's hardly gonna seem worth the money to bring it over there.
This one EB store has 23 pre-orders (including mine) for the game. The other 2 EB stores close by (20 mins and 35 mins drive away respectively) report pre-orders of 21 and 38 respectively also...
There's 82 orders in 3 stores.
There's 15 EB stores in Melbourne. There are also innumerable other stores that also sell computer games here, several of whom I've contacted and also have pre-orders taken for this game as well (although they wouldn't tell me the actual numbers).
I'd suggest there is a market for this game, and that the distributor is just incompetent if they do not know "what the market wants".
quote:
Abbikat probably says this to all the girls:
Melbourne.
[ 05-22-2003: Message edited by: Mog ]
WOOT!
quote:
Where's Waisz? stumbled drunkenly to the keyboard and typed:
I may be wrong, but I think part of the problem can be a lot of the hoops they have to jump through to preserve international copyrights that will suit their attorney division.
I don't see how this can have an affect on when games are released. There are numerous examples of games released on the same day as the US, but others held up from sale for up to 3 months after US release (these also tend to end up being among the largest volume sales potential).
1st Eg: Unreal Tournament 2003, which was release 6 weeks after US release. The reason? "Determining probable market reaction to the game."
Problem: Unreal Tournament 2003 sales Australia wide are far less than anticipated by the distributor.
Reason: Those people who were most likely to buy the game had already arranged for copies to be shipped to them from the US during the 6 week delay between releases. (Fed Ex and UPS will ship goods from US to Australia in as little as 2 to 5 working days, including customs clearance, depending on the service you wish to pay for. Air mail takes, on average, 6 to 8 days. Surface mail between US and Australia takes 15 days. This is a heck of a lot quicker than 42 days.)
Initial result: Very poor return of profit.
Does this say that Unreal Tournament 2003 was not a popular game in Australia? The answer is a resounding negative. The demand was extremely high, but the supply was non-existant here. So the consumers exercised their rights and purchased supply through other means.
Net Result: Australian distributor (possibly) looses money on importing and retailing of product. They decide not to import similar product in future.
If this occurs across too many distributors, soon no-one is willing to supply, since the demand is being met through other sources. Is this the fault of the consumer, or the fault of the supplier (distributor)?? Simple economics will answer that one.
In the end: Good outcome for US based distributors (and Fed Ex/UPS).
2nd Eg: Warcraft 3, released same day as US release.
Multiple sources of supply report being sold out of product within hours of opening.
Obviously demand was high for this game (as it was for UT2003), and distributor in this case managed to get things organised correctly.
Win for Australian distributor (high profits froms sales), win for Aussie gamer.
To my mind, it's not a case of experiencing 'legal difficulties' regarding copyright for the release of games. Instead it seems more that there are too many distributors who fail to understand the market niche they are attempting to put themselves into.
(Having said that however, I dont work in the industry, so I'm only making suppositions).
quote:
A sleep deprived Mog stammered:
WOOT!
Photocopy that, and the shipping ticket (or whatever), and send them in to the distributor that didn't release it.
Get other people doing that too. Make them see just how much money they're losing. And how many customers they're pissing off. See if local stores will pass the word to do this, if they do it could make a difference.
quote:
Abbikat spewed forth this undeniable truth:
tis where 
shes from
quote:
Palador ChibiDragon stumbled drunkenly to the keyboard and typed:
Have someone ship it to you. Have them send you the recipt as well.Photocopy that, and the shipping ticket (or whatever), and send them in to the distributor that didn't release it.
Get other people doing that too. Make them see just how much money they're losing. And how many customers they're pissing off. See if local stores will pass the word to do this, if they do it could make a difference.
True.
But the average gamer is too apathetic to follow through such things. I know I am.
Once I've got the game, I don't (generally) give a flying fsck how I actually got it, I'm too engrossed in playing the fscker...
quote:
When the babel fish was in place, it was apparent Mog said:
tis where
who da fuck??
Never seen her before...
Melbourne, Australia?
or Melbourne, FL??
What happens when you spend (hundreds of?) thousands of dollars to ship a game overseas, only to have it banned a week later?
You lose oodles of money~ [ 05-23-2003: Message edited by: D ]
quote:
D had this to say about Pirotess:
Well, you've also got to remember, Australia and Europe are both full of a lot of uptight "BAN IT ALL" evangelists.
That would be Pipper Gore and Hillary Clinton, right?? "Oh my God won't somebody think of the children!!!!"
Or the ones who claim EQ is an evil spawn of Satan that leads to people killing themselves.
Mmhmmm.. I've heard LOTS of people over here making those comments...
And nothing at all from people in the US..
...
wait..
...
wasn't it the otherway around????
quote:
What happens when you spend (hundreds of?) thousands of dollars to ship a game overseas, only to have it banned a week later?You lose oodles of money~
[cue Mission: Impossible theme]
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to:
Name one computer game banned from sale in Australia in the past 2 years.
[/Mission: Impossible theme]
Oh, and BMXXX, but that's a console game and I knew you'd whine about the distinction. [ 05-23-2003: Message edited by: Comrade Snoota ]
The original Postal was banned in Australia as well, I wouldn't be surprised if Postal 2 and Vice City are on the chopping block.
[ 05-23-2003: Message edited by: D ]
Fuck you, Snoota. No more white hoes.
quote:
Everyone wondered WTF when D wrote:
Impossible? I think not.
Ok, I suppose I should have anticipated CONSOLE games among computer games. Perhaps next time I shall be more specific and identified PC Computer games (which is what my whole rant was about).
quote:
The original Postal was banned in Australia as well, I wouldn't be surprised if Postal 2 and Vice City are on the chopping block.
Postal' s ban was lifted (I have a copy, would you like it?). [Edit:} Also, this is well over 2 years old. What was the criteria for searching??]
Postal 2 is currently not scheduled for release by any distributor in Australia. The distributors don't want to sell it because even after all the hype about how Postal was banned, very few folks actually bothered to go buy it when said ban was lifted.
Vice City was released last week.
[ 05-23-2003: Message edited by: Abbikat ]
Nice to see that you switched to PC games for this effort though... Run out of CONSOLE games to list?
Do they remind you of MEN?
I missed your point.
quote:
D had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
Do you have something against consoles?Do they remind you of MEN?
Gya ha ha ha
Yes, Americans have their loud opinions, but it is meant to be that way to help keep the freedoms of owning games like GTA if you want to without fear of government involvement outside of warning labels
Consoles are computers with special input devices.
quote:
Comrade Snoota had this to say about Matthew Broderick:
I own GTA3 for my computer. And I will be owning Vice City in a week or two.I missed your point.
I'm worried about VC on the PC..
I mean, the controls were so nice for the PS2.. I can't imagine a keyboard/mouse default setting that would do it justice..
Yeah, yeah. You probably have a joystick, I know. Or you're "uber" like Khy and have a PS2->USB converter.
quote:
D had this to say about Robocop:
Do you have something against consoles?Do they remind you of MEN?
I don't own a console gaming platform.. so why would I be concerned about what is and is not available to play on them??
I just dont see the need to have more than one gaming machine in the house. I can't, after all, play DAoC on the PC and "Super Mario Bros XXIIIV: The Absolutely Last, We Really Mean It, Final Battle" (or whatever else is available currently for XBox, PS2, Gamecube...) so why should I bother?
Twenty two?
Maybe you mean XXVIII.
Until that board give a Yay or Nay to a game (or movie) it cannot be imported for distribution into the country. Anyone who does so faces a massive fine for breaching Import Laws.
So how do distributors lose "oodles of money" if they havent actually brought a game in before it's banned??
Answer: They don't, unless they were stupid enough to break the law by importing batches of said game into the country... in which case they are not only incompetent, but criminally incompetent to boot.
quote:
How.... Pesco.... uughhhhhh:
For the most part.. the only company that effects distribution in the US would be Walmart, and mildly at best. But they are not being told by the Government not to sell stuff.Yes, Americans have their loud opinions, but it is meant to be that way to help keep the freedoms of owning games like GTA if you want to without fear of government involvement outside of warning labels
Consoles are computers with special input devices.
I like this post and everything Snoota has thus far said.
And as was said in IRC, and here, the fact is that it doesn't matter what your purchasing market is like if your government is, frankly, full of busybodies who are part of the "video games are corrupting our youth" epidemic that seems to be sweeping the world. And before you get pissy, we have the same problem here in the USA.
The difference? Here in the USA, games like BMXXX, Postal, etc may get griped about by some "Concerned Parent Watchdog Groups" (busybody groups who want a witch to burn rather than discipline their own kids), and may even get a warning label, and stores may not sell them to kids under 18 or whatever, but they haven't actually been BANNED have they?
Doesn't matter if the ban is rescinded later. The fact is that the damage to the market has been done. We can spend 50 million dollars promoting a fifty dollar game. Now...to make that money up in that market, we have to reasonably expect to sell a million copies of the game. Part of that in games that are particularly gory, violent, explicit (hell even music that has explicit lyrics, but we're arguing the point of games at the moment) is the novelty of it. If it pushes things in a new direction, then it's only going to be new, be novel, for the first X number of weeks. So if Postal was banned in it's peak period of monetary rebate (IE when it would make up the losses of promoting it in Australia), then that's $50,000,000 or whatever they spent that they won't ever really have a chance to regain in a reasonable amount of time. See time factors into the equation too (does even with non-controversial games). So losing fifty million dollars due to a government ban AFTER you've promoted and planned on selling something in a market makes it, frankly, a bad marketplace.
It's not YOUR fault as the gamer necessarily, so please don't take anything I've said personally. The best thing you could possibly do is elect people whose heads aren't up their asses (we have to do the same thing here in the USA, so I'm not saying that politicians with heads up their asses is something Australia has a monopoly on). In the short term, however, you need to (to be blunt) suck it up. It's not the fault of the companies if they don't want to lose money. It's the marketplace that's bad.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
quote:
Abbikat had this to say about Robocop:
So how do distributors lose "oodles of money" if they havent actually brought a game in before it's banned??
Answer: They lose money based off possible profits that game could have generated for the company had it not been banned or had restrictions while being looked over. Then once they get the OK for the game, the US distributors still have the upperhand since they are ready-to-go for the most part via net sales for an eager public, while the local distrubutor attempts to get them into stores.
[ 05-23-2003: Message edited by: Drysart ]
quote:
There was much rejoicing when D said this:
Why is the floor so sticky?
Sorry.
