Gaming Down Under

Does the long white cloud have a silver lining?

New Zealand is awesome. Even if you've never been anywhere else, you'll agree that there's a lot to love about the land of the long white cloud. If you have spent some time abroad, chances are good you'll look on your time at home as some of the best time of your life. What's not to like, right? We've got clouds (which are sometimes even long and / or white) which often sit daintily above the gorgeous mountainous terrain which makes the background of so many movies just that much more epic. We're also pretty low on nuclear weapons and, last time I looked, aside from the fact that we have the internet, there's not much for a terrorist to get seriously upset about.

So what's the problem?

It turns out that being a video gamer here is a bit harder than it is for people in other parts of the world. It's not all bad, of course, with the occasional "first in the world" release of games (thanks to a low timezone "ping") and ummm... yeah that's about it. As a concerned gamer and someone with a soapbox, it would be a waste to not stand on it and rant about something, wouldn't it?

First up, Australia. Yeah that's right, I'm looking at you bent-stick throwing, funny talking, please don't invade us supermen across the sea. I kinda lost my way there but I'm pretty sure you get who I'm talking about. The thing is, over there, their sissy state (who want to ban bits of the internet) thinks video games are the domain of the child and the child alone. Why should we care? Well, it turns out that the rest of the world thinks we're part of Australia. So when GTA IV, for example, is refused classification under their "people get hurt! BAN IT!" scheme, the "for kiddies" version (where people sprout flowers when shot with nerf guns and say "I love you" a lot) ends up on our shelves as well. Wake up, publishers, we've got an R18 rating for a reason - our mature society understands that video game experiences can be suitable for all sorts of ages, not just "all ages".

Sure, we don't always get the cut-down versions (Left4Dead 2, for example) and occasionally they're allowed games that our own censor denies us (Reservoir Dogs). But a quick look at the list of titles banned, censored or otherwise impacted by Australia's lack of an R18 label compared to our lifetime total of just four affected games is enough to make this point more than worthwhile. We're not Australia, we have a mature classification system.

Please don't lump us in with that market.

Now, let's talk about prices. More specifically, the price of games in New Zealand - starting with retail. A random example (the very top of Mighty Ape's new releases list, as I write this) - Dragon's Quest IX. In New Zealand, it's $89.99 RRP. In the US, it's the equivalent of $48.30 (NZ). I'm no idiot but I reckon I could get it shipped here for somewhat less than $41 - and that's ignoring the fact that local distributors pay wholesale and ship in bulk. What's the story here? I get people need to make money but there's already margin in the $48 price - is our small market really enough to completely explain this?

In case you're wondering, this is no isolated example. NCAA Football 2011? $139.99 here, $83 NZD there. Persona 3 portable? $90 here, $55 there. StarCraft II? $130 here, $82 there.



And that's not even whining about the fact that, in most cases, they get their games first! Ok maybe this is whining about that. Still, the point is, we get it later and pay more - why? Sure, there are economies of scale at work. We've got a smaller market so the cost of serving it is increased. Our cities are small so there are more shipments required to shift a pallet of goods. Someone has to pay the wages of the various people involved. That makes sense - to a point. But the internet is here and anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together can see the money to be saved by ordering from a site that doesn't end in .co.nz. If this model doesn't change, more and more money is going to be heading off shore - starting with my own.

Why not import every time, I hear you ask. For the most part, it's pretty simple - you can't. Sure, you can get the thing through some backwater exporter (the mainstream sites simply don't ship here - period) but the chances are pretty good it won't work when it gets here. If it's not simple region locking (Wii, 360, take a bow) it's regional specificity (where titles are locked into region-specific downloadable content, like music for band games etc). This leaves importers locked, for the most part, into PS3, PSP, PC and DS which are, for the most part, not region locked. Even those waters are being muddied somewhat, with region-specific DLC or DS games that don't work on other-region DSi systems without warning (Sonic DS Collection, for example).

Perhaps modchips are the answer. In theory, modding your system to allow titles from any region to work on it is perfectly legal - however the more common reason for modchips is to enable piracy, making them something publishers (and responsible gamers) cannot support.

So let's put modchips aside and think about downloadable services - after all, chances are that the concept of a physical disk or cartridge with games on it won't make it beyond the next generation of gaming systems (if it even makes it that far). We already have downloadable game services for all of the gaming systems on the market, with download being the only option for Apple's products. Download-only hasn't hurt Apple any, with hundreds of thousands of applications (including tens of thousands of games) selling millions of units combined across the various iDevices they sell.

So how does it hurt me, I hear you asking.

As a Kiwi gamer, you're subject to the same restrictions in the downloadable space as you are in your local game store. Sure, you may have continued access to games that have long since lost the right to valuable real estate on a physical shelf (Beyond Good and Evil on Steam - look it up, you won't regret it) but if a publisher wants you to wait or doesn't want you to have it, without some hackery and access to international methods of payment, you're out of luck.

Then there's pricing. You'd think that without having to pay a people to design boxes, write manuals, print discs, package things up a couple of times, ship them to distribution centres who then ship them to retailers, put them on a shelf then regail you with innaccuracies as you dodge their sale signs and hand over your payment details, you'd save a couple of bucks. Right?



Wrong. Mostly. Sometimes you do save money (Steam sales, I love you - thank you for making the right kind of waves in this space) but oftentimes, for reasons that can only be imagined to be sinister, prices are not only on parity with a resellable physical copy but they can even cost MORE! Check out the price of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 on Steam. In the US, it's $59.99 USD. If you buy from Steam in New Zealand, it's $89.99 USD! That works out, at our currently competitive exchange rate, to $10 NZD MORE than it would cost in the shops. Is there some collusion from local distributors to make the market in New Zealand less competitive?

And that's not even considering the additional cost of actually getting a modern game via download. Let's not forget that the price of purchase is just to get access to it - you've then got to download it too. At 11.15GB, Modern Warfare 2 is going to cost the average gamer another $20-$30 in download fees on top of the purchase price, making for a total price of around $150 NZD for something you could buy off the shelf in the US for no more than it's recommended price of just $82 NZ! It seems hard to justify an additional $68 just for the convenience of being able to shop naked.

This isn't a one-off example, either. Borderlands was briefly available for a reasonable price but very quickly (around the launch of the game) became $80 USD. Metro 2033 can be seen on sale for $20 on PC but on Steam it clocks in at nearly SIX times that price. If you're looking forward to Civilization V and are on a budget, might want to buy it at full price from your local game store - it, too, is $80 USD on Steam.



Then there's waiting. Waiting for the thing you want sucks - doubly so when the internet you browse is packed full of "available now!" advertising for it and forums of people discussing it. Super Mario Galaxy 2, I'm looking at you - released in the USA first, in early May, it eventually meandered its way through Japan a few days later, Europe in June and then finally could be bothered turning up here in July. Why? It's not like they developed a Te Reo version just for us. (Although, that would be pretty cool... "Ko Mario taku ingoa!!") So why in this age of unprecedented global communications are we subject to arbitrary delays?

It's no wonder people are turning to piracy. I'm not excusing it, I abhor it, but I can't help but wonder if addressing the above complaints would be a more effective method of stamping it out than pushing prices up and prosecuting your fans.

Once you actually get a game, chances are good a lot of you are going to want to play it online. That is, after all, the future, with more and more games going online where you can play with your friends or even make new ones. Pity all of the servers are based a long way away - even at the speed of our modern internet (something that won't be dramatically improved without breaking the laws of physics, no matter the connection you might have) you're going to have a worse experience in most games than people close to those servers. That makes sense and is fair enough for the smaller titles. But what irks me is the lack of willingness to install a local server in a local datacentre for the big titles.

If you're going to force traffic to travel to a server, please consider renting some rackspace somewhere closer; if not New Zealand, Australia is pretty close as the ping flies. Given each server only supports a few thousand people, is it really that much more expensive to give us access to the experiences promised on the back of the box? Maybe we need to get some people from Blizzard down here to try out PvP and see how they do. A quick crack at an Arena with a Rogue ought to give them something to think about!

/end rant



Don't get me wrong, it's not all bad. It may sound like I hate gaming or hate New Zealand - nothing could be further from the truth. There are awesome gamers down here, with some great communities; arguably, because the population is smaller, groups of like minded individuals are a lot smaller, which can create a stronger sense of community. We're also lucky enough to have some amazing local distributors who really care about their customers.

But.

There are some legitimate reasons for some of my complaints. I want to get the discussion started because I think some of these points are worthy of further consideration. Because sometimes it can just seem downright unfair - we get the same view of what looks like an amazing open market available in other countries, but we often can't participate. In some ways it can feel like you're on the outside looking in, with your face pressed up against the window glass of a cool shop you can't get into.

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