THE iDOLM@STER > THE iDOLM@STER 2
Vic Ireland on translating im@s
Setsuna:
--- Quote from: Daverost on May 11, 2012, 12:55:49 am ---That's a completely different scenario. You're talking English -> English importing.
Not only that, but I don't recall reverse importing of English games to be a huge issue killing the Japanese game market to begin with. Reverse importing of anime, sure, but not games.
--- End quote ---
Nope, we also have Asian grey imports (Korea is a good example of this, with another Samsung product, and Kogan have been making good money selling Korean PHONES, to people who can't read Korean). It's gotten so bad that even the government has gotten involved with a productivity commission with the question 'what the hell is going on?'.
In fact, there's quite a few Japanese 3DSes floating around - this is due to the 100 dollar (yes, you read this right, it's a full 33% more expensive in Australia than the US!) price arbitrage. Some were sourced from the US, but the Japanese ones have sold surprisingly well.
This isn't limited to gaming by the way. We have grey imports of Japanese food. Yes, I'm not kidding. There's a grey import market for FOOD in Australia.
Why? Price arbitage of about 25% to 33%
Not 50% or 100% (ie, im@s 2). A quarter to a third of what's required to make the im@s2 scenario work.
Why does this matter? Well, they just slap a single sticker on it (translated nutritional requirements) and put it on the shelf. Im@s 2 sort of has similar requirements - Get a guide on how to get the stuff in Japanese, and that's about ALL you need. (This can be easily proven - Hi there im@s wiki! I can't read Japanese, and I update the im@s online compendium. And I used to work as a reporter in the space for about 12 years.)
You don't really think about price arbitrage being a big thing, but that's because you don't experience it much or come into direct contact with it, if you're in the US or in Canada.
In Australia? There's a MASSIVE price arbitrage, and they use stuff imported around the world (UK, US, Japan, HK, China, India, you pretty much NAME it, and there's decent odds of parallel or grey importing). Essentially, we've hit the point where the local demands are literally 'Tax all private imports more' even though that's a operational impossiblity (it'd send the Australian Government (via customs) broke because any taxes they recover would be dwarfed by the costs of compliance.)
So it's in my face every day, when I go shopping. And yes, we get everything from biscuits, breakfast foods all the way down to ipads (Yes, we got grey APPLE products. I'm not kidding.) and all sorts of other hardware.
Yes, there are risks, but considering the savings can be somewhere in the vicinity of 33-66%, damn right you'll see people flock to them.
Basically, you're incredibly underestimating what happens when you make a massive price disparency, mostly because you haven't actually been in the middle of what happens when one happens.
The only way to prevent it is to literally a) control all information and b) con the government to make the parallel import illegal. a) was true before the internet became a thing, and b) used to be true until Sony pushed their luck and got the backsides handed to them in the Surpreme Court and consequently opened that up.
Australia is a perfect example of what you should expect if you make a massive gap in costs - it didn't take the price differentials lying down, and it's gotten to the point where all the retailers are claiming it's going to MURDER their industry wholesale (some since have given up and joined in, see Harvey Norman), because a non trivial percentage of sales are now happening outside the country.
The size of that sales figure? About 10% It's only doubling every two years though, so a final established figure of maybe 33-40% isn't unreasonable.
By the way, the average arbitrage? About a 33% discount, average. There's a few examples where they go a clean double, and some that clear even more than that.
However, that's not the scary part. The Australian GOVERNMENT launched an inquiry over it because it FEARS that the revenue loss will hurt its tax revenues over a long period of time. It can't claim GST or duty for most private purchases simply due to the fact the cost of compliance costs more than the money they could possibly make.
...
So you're telling me that if we do a full 50% (or half price, if you prefer) for im@s 2, we won't see anything close to the same results that have an entire NATION up in arms and a government frightened?
Yeah, I believe the entire nation of AUSTRALIA might want to have a word with your assertion. The Australian Government and all the major retailers too, because clearly everyone here has been hallucinating and blowing hot air and importing all for nothing, and you're apparently entirely correct that extreme price differences mean nothing. And NBGI, since you're asking them to risk their revenue stream and clearly their concerns are moot.
Daverost:
Regardless of whether or not it's happening in Australia, it has, to the best of my knowledge, NEVER happened in Japan and is unlikely to start out of nowhere with an iM@S2 localization. The scenario of an English localization of a Japanese game at a lower price point has happened tens of thousands of times and has never once taken that kind of turn. There's zero evidence to support any theory that it ever will.
TTB:
--- Quote ---This isn't limited to gaming by the way. We have grey imports of Japanese food. Yes, I'm not kidding. There's a grey import market for FOOD in Australia.
--- End quote ---
lol what...?
So I've looked into it and it turns out there's a number of theories as to why Aus prices are so incredibly high: Exchange rate, Australia's growing economy, ridiculous 12 dollar minimum wage! (That alone is mind-boggling, the only political explanation that comes to mind for something like that must be runaway batsh** insane socialism up the yahoo, at least by American standards).
So I looked up the exchange rate:
1 Australian dollar = 1.0053 US dollars
Wow 12 dollar minimum wage? Australia's operating on an entirely different set of numbers. But yeah, the grey market thing must be huge. Still, the food thing is laugh out loud funny. What kinds of food do you see getting sold on the grey market? Reminds me of a story recently about illegal smuggling of BOLOGNA\BALONEY for sandwiches across the Mexican-US border lol...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20124855-504083/bologna-smuggler-busted-at-u.s.-mexico-border/
As for IM@S being so expensive in Japan, don't Japanese gamers feel ripped off too like Australian gamers when they see the dirt cheap US prices? How did the standard price become so high compared to the U.S.? I'm thinking of IM@S and all the seiyuu licensing fees... but no really... even like eroge that's just drawings and starving seiyuu abound over there like starving artists everywhere, but still the eroge costs like 100 USD... how do they get away with that? And if they could get away with a higher price, why not just charge more? What keeps the games industry from moving together up to 105 or 110 USD for a new game?
Just thinking about it is bizarre... us consumers here in the U.S. have it really good don't we... :P
Elixir:
The AUD:USD exchange rate isn't really an accurate thing to judge by, it's only matched the USD in recent years. Feel free to visit mightyape.co.nz and convert games into your own currency, if you want to see what kind of prices I see here.
--- Quote from: TTB on May 11, 2012, 09:49:12 am ---As for IM@S being so expensive in Japan, don't Japanese gamers feel ripped off too like Australian gamers when they see the dirt cheap US prices?
--- End quote ---
The target demographic's games cater to a Japanese audience in Japanese, always coming out before the states ― while a PAL gamer sees a game released in English for the states, yet they won't receive it until 6 months later, and for twice the price. Meanwhile the game has deteriorated in value as well. Importing Tales of Graces f cost me $70 USD, which I don't consider expensive as $80-100 USD per game has been the norm for two decades.
Setsuna:
--- Quote from: TTB on May 11, 2012, 09:49:12 am ---lol what...?
So I've looked into it and it turns out there's a number of theories as to why Aus prices are so incredibly high: Exchange rate, Australia's growing economy, ridiculous 12 dollar minimum wage! (That alone is mind-boggling, the only political explanation that comes to mind for something like that must be runaway batsh** insane socialism up the yahoo, at least by American standards).
So I looked up the exchange rate:
1 Australian dollar = 1.0053 US dollars
Wow 12 dollar minimum wage? Australia's operating on an entirely different set of numbers. But yeah, the grey market thing must be huge. Still, the food thing is laugh out loud funny. What kinds of food do you see getting sold on the grey market? Reminds me of a story recently about illegal smuggling of BOLOGNA\BALONEY for sandwiches across the Mexican-US border lol...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20124855-504083/bologna-smuggler-busted-at-u.s.-mexico-border/
As for IM@S being so expensive in Japan, don't Japanese gamers feel ripped off too like Australian gamers when they see the dirt cheap US prices? How did the standard price become so high compared to the U.S.? I'm thinking of IM@S and all the seiyuu licensing fees... but no really... even like eroge that's just drawings and starving seiyuu abound over there like starving artists everywhere, but still the eroge costs like 100 USD... how do they get away with that? And if they could get away with a higher price, why not just charge more? What keeps the games industry from moving together up to 105 or 110 USD for a new game?
Just thinking about it is bizarre... us consumers here in the U.S. have it really good don't we... :P
--- End quote ---
Grey importing is when you decide to import a product from a third party in another country, as opposed to the distributor that normally handles that country's product. In Australia it's not illegal it's just going to upset business relations, as you can guess.
An example is in Australia, Woolworths (One of the two major supermarket chains) grey imports Pringle Chips from Mexico. It's apparently cheaper to do that, than to buy them from the local distributor here (Which of course upset the hell out of them). They say the supplier cost was 50c more (out of a sales final price of about 3 dollars)
The cans themselves are in SPANISH, and they slap a translated nutritional information chart on the thing, and throw them on the shelf.
Another example is I bought a box of Oreos for a dollar. They normally sell for about 3. These ones were the Japanese ones, as I saw Japanese kana and Kanji on them. The distributor tried to file court proceedings to prevent the grey importing sometime last year, and they lost the case.
You can probably see where I'm going with this - The margins are just so high, that people (both retailers AND consumers) will seek to cut the margins down, cause they want to pay less.
Any claim that they WON'T as a market on language grounds is outright crazy, because well, you're describing an ENTIRE COUNTRY that's doing it enough to scare a GOVERNMENT over tax revenue. Price Arbitrage if you can take advantage of it is powerful stuff.
As for why Australia is very expensive, just say 'It's complicated.'
Basically it's always been this expensive, mostly due to the principle that markets will always charge whatever prices it can support.
Or in laymen's terms 'They'll charge as much as they think they can get away with.'
As I said above (which someone else is conveniently ignoring) the reason why we had a recent price collapse (to the point the government is scared of losing TAX revenue over it) is because the price differential is just so LARGE.
There's a significant interest difference (You can get 6% interest on a term deposit here) and there's also the weakness in the US market (It's complicated, but long story short - the US needs to get its house in order).
It also has a remoteness and more to the point, a limited competition base. Basically the US does not generally suffer from a significant lack of competition.
In regards with the Japanese industry, they charge so much because a) they can get away with it because well, where else can you go? and b) It's generally understood that the sales rate is so low (usually 10000ish or so, so you can guess they'd need to turn over more per sale)
It's actually sustainable - basically they make games on a basis where a low sales figure won't instantly blow them up. They won't post amazing profits, but the losses are limited.
In regards with the US one - let's put it this way - They REALLY shot themselves in the foot. Basically, they held down the price of games deliberately (Absorbing inflation costs for about 10 years or so) in an attempt to mass market (Namely make up a small profit by selling LOTS of copies).
It worked, except in the process caused a distortion in the market. It's a lot more complicated than that, but once again, the industry is ignoring the elephant in the room here. One of the oddities in the mainstream US market is that it is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE to sell a million copies of a game and still NOT break even! (This actually happened to a PS3 title)
Right now, it'd be very difficult to raise the price of a US title - mostly due to the state of the US economy. The companies are scared they can't sell to their model if they raise the price too much though.
Basically more 'Prices are set to what the market can bear' and in the US it's pretty poor at the moment.
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