Dark Souls almost doubles in price on PC today for Australians
By Tim Colwill on July 26, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Twitter user Sean Gabriel just pointed out to us that the Steam price for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has almost doubled today, going up from $39.95 to the new price of $69.95. No reason was given for the change, and international prices remain unchanged with US players paying $39.99 for their copies. We’ve contacted NamcoBandai for an explanation and will let you know what we learn.
Source: @suibriel
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Wow..
what i don’t understand is why they come out at the ‘normal’ price at all….?
I was expecting it to be more expensive than that to be honest. I never saw the $39.95 price tag but that $69.95 price tag isn’t as bad as I almost expected it to be.
Also, $70 is not double $40. Not even nearly. Where did that come from? <_<
All the talk about it lagging as much on PC as it does on console while looking exactly the same, and now the price increase. No sale from me.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Are we thick? Surely, we must be, even if just a little bit. This has been happening for YEARS! If a game comes out around the $40 on pre-order, it should be an expectation that it will double in price nearer the release date. It sucks that it happens that way, but if we can see it coming we should just make better decisions at the time.
I expect this sort of crap from big publishers like Beth, Acti and 2K but for a delayed console port for a game that is almost a year old now it’s just fucking greedy.
Yeah I was thinking of buying this when I saw it for $40 on steam, but there is definitely no way I am going to bother with it being $70…. Isn’t darksouls like 6-12 months old (console version)???
All I can say is, yarrrrr
Actually, no. This is not a ‘thing’ which we ‘should expect’ and leave at that. It’s wrong, it’s predatory, and it’s been happening for far too long.
This isn’t a case of ‘making better decisions’. This is not about the consumer. This is about the publisher, and the publisher can go and get f’cked.
An expectation as in, you know if you head down that dark alley towards the leering rapist, you gonna get raped. This has been happening for years and you should learn to avoid it by getting in early on preorders at that price bracket if it’s something you want to buy.
The excuses for the price-jacking tactics are gone. It’s been some time now that AUD has been on-par with USD, and is, now, often trading at a higher rate. In fact, XE is reporting that the USD is only 96 cents to the AUD at this very moment. There is no import cost for a Steam sale. There are no production costs for a Steam sale. This needs to stop.
Here’s the scenario:
Australian Retailer: “Hi Namco, your game listed on Steam is half of what we’d like to charge for, given the exorbitant amount our distributer takes, and the fact that we want to make a huge margin. Could you fix that for us. I’m not saying we’ll boycott, but we wont push sales of your future games.”
Namco: “Hi Retailer, thats an excellent point, and if we near double the steam price, all that extra revenue will go straight to us anyway. We cut out the middle man online, so we’ll be throwing money piles at each other as we skip around the office.”
Well you can still get it on greenmangaming for 39.99.
$70 is too much for a GFWL console RPG imo. However I may pick this up in the future for a much cheaper price (as mentioned above greenmangaming.com is still a good option although id only be willing to pay $20 for the game).
What.
Sorry mate, but what a load of accepting crap. To continue your delightful example, that’s the same as telling women to not walk the streets at night because they could be raped. It avoids the *actual* problem completely.
Seriously. No.
Sort of.
The average retailer doesn’t make much money in games, if any. I used to work for a major retailer – and we dropped the price on games from the average $99 to the $68-$78 range. And in doing so every single game sale was done at a loss. In fact, most game sales that are not dropped sit in the 5% profit margin area. Its pointless, completely and utterly pointless, to sell games in a bricks and mortar store. Its only done to create revenue stream, not profit stream. NEVER profit stream.
The -only- thing that makes any sense to me is some sort of ‘fair trading’ bullshit. Retailers are charged huge amounts to sell the games, and if they sold them at the same price as the online retailers, it would be less than half the price they paid. So they probably do complain, and price gets jacked up, to bring in line with our ‘normal’ pricing.
The problem is the distributors, and the costs they charge to get products shipped around Australia. They -don’t- hear our arguments, and even if they did, they don’t care. Charming parts of Australian law prevent retailers from going direct to sources or finding alternate suppliers of products, everyone goes to the same distributors, to keep trading ‘fair’ – as in, a larger company, without the legislation, would have the resources to cut out the middle man and get direct shipping instead. Smaller companies wouldn’t, conceivably, be able to manage it, so everyone goes to the same people, and they charge the same prices knowing that there is no competition, and thus we get the situation we have.
There is a lot more to it than that. Basically, Australian pricing jacks are common across the board, and the reasoning for them is painfully murky, indistinct, and ill explained.
As an aside, I’m wondering at what point people will finally accept that brick and mortar sales of ‘virtual’ goods is out-dated and dead. It was only a viable business model when it was required, when our network and access (both ours and the sellers) to that network was poor.
I’d like to see more suddent price hike exposure stories that potentially embarass greedy pig companies!
I look forward to seeing their response,,,if any…
wyld,
And what are you going to do about it, right now, that will change that fact? The fact is, it happens, work around it.
Seriously. That’s the answer that will suit 99% of people.
I hate to say it but I sore this yesterday afternoon. Got home and the game was bumped up to the shocking new figure of $69.95 AUD. I am happy that I was able to get this at the low price of $39.95.
I know the game could be bad as its a straight up xbox port but I have never played it and everyone has said that its a great game.
Had to pick it up at the old price knowing full well that it would get price jacked. I think most people would have done the same.
If not they will be leaving until the Steam sales in Christmas no dout.
$70 for a console port? Fucking lol.
This happened to Prototype 2 recently also. Went from $49.99 to $79.95. That’s a 70% increase on a DIGITAL download because we live in Australia. USA still get it for $49.99. I am glad I got it cheaper, I would hate to have to pay the new price now.
I wish publishers would stop doing this.
I know where i’ll do my shopping. tpb
I already have it on the PS3 but I was going to buy it on the PC anyway.
Not now, kinda pissed actually.
Getting really sick of this, I wish more people called it discrimination and really drive home the point that this is not on, and not buy the game at all rather than search out other ways to buy it.
I’m really starting to feel like a second class citizen online, This territorial nonsense on the internet is really leaving me cold.
Greenmangaming has it for $39.95 there, and for the next few days you can use this code “COSYO-UDIDN-TGET1″ to get 20% off, bringing it down to $32.
It’s a Steamworks game, so you get a Steam key anyway.
http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/au/en/pc/games/action/dark-souls-prepare-die-edition-na/
This would be a bad excuse to get it from tpb shlaimon, after PC owners worked hard to get it on PC. It’s better to support the developers and not punish them because of the publisher. Also, I doubt you’ll be able to enjoy all the awesome and integral online features with a pirated copy.
I’ll support the developers. Link me to where I can purchase it directly from the developers and give zero money to the greedy publishers? Didn’t think so.
Thanks eggheart, jude ordered it.
To those wanting to not give any money to the ‘greedy publishers’, go support an indie game.
yeapal,
I suggested buying it at it’s original fair price instead of stealing it, as a way of supporting the developers who worked hard on the game, and your response is to say that buying the game doesn’t support the developers because the publisher is still involved? I can’t understand your logic. If the “Aussie tax” is annoying you so much (as it annoys me), there’s an easy way to bypass it without pirating the game. If this price jack is going to cause somebody to pirate the game when there’s an easy alternative to paying it (which is even cheaper than the Steam price!), then that person was probably going to steal the game anyway and justify it in some other way to themselves.
Pirating the game will send a stronger message to the developer (i.e. don’t make PC games), than it will to the publisher, so vote with your dollar, or don’t, but anybody trying to justify piracy as a way of ‘sticking it to the man’ is just being pathetic.
http://www.ozgameshop.com/pc-games/dark-souls-prepare-to-die-edition-game-pc
$45 Free shipping OGS
Well they just screwed themselves out a sale. I don’t buy games that jack up their prices like this out of principal.
It is a GFWL game …. no great loss …..
wait for it in steam sales… or when Eb going out of business sale ….
Or from greenman gaming which gives you a steam key and using the code drops the price down to $32 which is *cheaper* and still legit than the price before the hike.
You have options people, complaining that they’re not getting your purchase when there’s legit options there is kinda redundant.
Wasn’t going to buy it anyway due to GFWL.
Also, Scamco Bandit won’t respond.
Same here, thanks eggheart!
I’m going to pirate this anyway just to see how it plays, I’m sorry but that’s all i can do but pirate it, i suggest you guys do the same
zakynthos,
shame on you..
zakynthos,
I totally understand that heaps of people pirate games for various reasons. If it’s because there’s no demo and you’re worried about performance, then that’s fair enough if you actually buy the game after you’ve tried it. For many people I guess it’s because they don’t have much money during certain periods of their lives, which combined with the childish “I want to have everything right now even if I can’t afford it” mentality, leads to lots of piracy – I think that’s not a good reason, but I do understand it. I hope once you have a job and are happy to pay for the hobby that gives you a lot of enjoyment that you decide to start supporting the games industry a bit.
If you can afford it, then you should do the right thing in my opinion. It doesn’t actually cost very much to live your life with a bit of integrity, but each to their own I guess.
Also, specifically with Dark Souls, I think you may find that you’re missing out on a large part of the game, as it’s unlikely the multiplayer features will work on a pirated copy, which is an intrinsic part of the single player experience as well.
Ooh nice! As tempting as that Greenmangaming offer is, the art book and behind the scenes DVD pushed me this way instead. Only a few bucks more pricey and you get lots of physical type goodies to boot! :)
As I said on the steam forums: Starting now, I don’t care if it’s cheaper else where. I’m going to adopt a “no purchase at all” policy if publishers pull this s**t at any interval, be it from the start of prepurchase or after.
I’m going to deal with it by extreme measures, neither the developer nor publisher will get a cent from me.
I won’t be purchasing it either.
Hands up everybody that signed that petition. Very good, now who of you are now jumping up and down and proclaiming you won’t buy it because price change/gfwl/pc port/it killed your favourite pet gerbil? Good one guys, I think if enough of you guys stick to your guns you can convince From Software to never release a product on PC ever again. You’re all doing a fantastic job, bravo, keep fighting the good fight etc.
mank,
That’s fair enough. I personally get more satisfaction from getting around it though.
I think publishers/retailers are slowly getting the message that Aussies won’t put up with this, so it will probably change eventually. I do think it’s important to have regional pricing, so that countries with lower incomes are able to purchase products for reasonable prices, but the Aussie price jack is almost entirely without merit when it comes to digital goods. It’s a shame Steam doesn’t yet use it’s leverage to force publishers to standardise the price for locations of similar economic standing.
vcatkiller,
I didn’t sign the petition, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t say you agree to buy the game no matter what stupid price they charge, or DRM they force you to use, or host of any other conditions above and beyond just putting the game on PC and selling it for a fair price.
There is more to selling a game than just making it available, and if they fail in the other categories then agreeing in principle you wanted a PC version wasn’t some binding contract and if From Software can’t get their shit together and get a better publishing deal then I don’t care if they never make another PC port, because I wont be buying them anyway.
And this is from someone with both Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls on PS3, but would much rather play them on my PC.
But keep up the good fight too…for what exactly, the right for publishers to fuck over Australians?…good job. Just pay the money and shut the hell up right?
>_> I’ll just buy my copy off Cjs Keys again
True enough the petition wasn’t a legally binding contract to force people into buying the game. However it isn’t going to look good for future From Software releases with 100k signatures (or how many signatures they eventually managed to scrape up) and only a small percentage of those signers purchase. Of course you could always shop around instead and find it at a better price instead of boycotting, but whatever. Feel free to not purchase and jump on your hobby horse, just don’t expect it to have a positive outcome. <_<
Hey thanks heaps for this tip – used to use a vpn to get US prices but they seem to have stitched that up now. The only problem I am having with greenmangaming is that it won’t process my credit card or paypal account? Have you had this issue? I have emailed them for some assistance as well. Cheers!