Speaking to Gamespot, Rob Blythe, a consumer analyst for Macquarie Bank, has claimed that he expects video game prices in Australia to undergo a correction in the next year.
“Australia has been slow to adapt to international pricing for games, yes,” he began, “but I think in the second half of this year or at the very least by early 2012, we will start to see game prices in Australia coming down. From my estimates, I predict they’ll drop from around A$120 to somewhere around A$70.”
This echoes comments by Ubisoft Australia’s Managing Director Ed Fong.
“The exchange rate is the exchange rate,” he said, when we interviewed him earlier this year. “18 months ago it was a very different story. Should we peg our pricing to exchange rates? That gets messy.
“I think that if the exchange rate stays where it is, there’ll be a price correction.”
But according to Rob Blythe, the exchange rate will stabilise over the coming months at below parity, making importing less attractive to consumers, and with the expected games price correction at retail, things could become more competitive.
“… Australian pricing will still be at a premium to offshore, due to things like distribution and shipping costs,” he claimed, “but the gap won’t be as significant. Economists are predicting that our currency will normalize and eventually come back down below parity with the US dollar, and when that happens, the attractiveness of buying video games overseas will be eliminated for Aussie consumers.”
Aussie game prices to drop by end of year – Analyst [Gamespot]
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