Originally posted by deviliscious I have gotten a taste of the poor customer service that businesses offer in other countries when I had dish network installed when i moved in .. Man was that a mistake. They installed the wrong box , I wanted hd boxes only and they gave me some old piece of @#&;%! .. well I wasn;t even moved in yet it was 2 weeks prior to move in and so when I moved in and noticed what they had done, I tried calling customer service.. well first the sent me to some guy that barely could speaka english in the middleeast.. and He was telling me that I was going to have to pay for their mistake by purchasing a new box , that was supposed to be included with the original installation.. well I told him where he could put that box and their service basically. I wrote a letter to their corporate office letting them know why I had cancelled and the poor treatment I received. I also posted my expierance at my home owners association website letting all of my neighbors know exactly how I was treated by that company.Then I get these calls from"american" reps that are trying to give me 2 years free subscriptions and fix the box free.. but by then I had made up my mind already and told them " No Thanks" I already had another service installed. I finally had to write a noterized letter to them stating to take my name off their call lists because I was going to sue them for harrassment if they didn;t stop calling me trying to get me to come back. That is how americans deal with companies, so if they do not offer proper customer service, they lose our business and gain a bad reputation hindering new business.
you will get the same in the UK really. just that they will try as hard as possible not to admit be the one that made the mistake ...and it takes a while to get results fro the stubborn bastards
you will get the same in the UK really. just that they will try as hard as possible not to admit be the one that made the mistake ...and it takes a while to get results fro the stubborn bastards
It didn't take them long to admit they were in error... as soon as my cancelation crossed their desks, they were calling me begging me to reconsider. But what I considered was would I be sent to the same guy I talked to the first time everytime I have a problem with my service? No thanks, I don't need headaches ty. So yes, I turned down 2 years free service, and their apologies and they even went so far as to say that they had me as a " select customer" so that I would be guaranteed an american rep everytime I called in. But dealing with a company that would give that bad of customer service to anyone is not a company I care to deal with. See when i call customer service i expect them to be friendly and truely help resolve the problem, if they cannot do that then I take my business to someone who will.
Its just easier to roll out a MMO to the North American market, hence companies tend to focus on it first.
As others have pointed out, less hassle dealing with various languages, fewer local laws/regulations to keep track of, tax issues such as the VAT.
Heck, Funcom is a European developer, and they launched in the US first. And notice, regardless who develops the code, a majority of publishing houses are US based, so of course local favoritism comes into play a bit.
Besides, we whine better here in the states.
still...does not explain why in general the US has better customer service...
maybe because they give the americans initial release to test the game out before releasing an actual polished game in Europe so europeans can enjoy it more? American Guineapigsm
For english language version of games, the service centres will most likely be where the bulk of the english speaking population lives. That is, it will be somewhere in the USA /Canada area.
The pricing in Australia seems extremely expensive compared to US prices. Someone in the supply chain is making a killing.
As an example, I just did a quick comparison of Age of Conan prices:
you will get the same in the UK really. just that they will try as hard as possible not to admit be the one that made the mistake ...and it takes a while to get results fro the stubborn bastards
It didn't take them long to admit they were in error... as soon as my cancelation crossed their desks, they were calling me begging me to reconsider. But what I considered was would I be sent to the same guy I talked to the first time everytime I have a problem with my service? No thanks, I don't need headaches ty. So yes, I turned down 2 years free service, and their apologies and they even went so far as to say that they had me as a " select customer" so that I would be guaranteed an american rep everytime I called in. But dealing with a company that would give that bad of customer service to anyone is not a company I care to deal with. See when i call customer service i expect them to be friendly and truely help resolve the problem, if they cannot do that then I take my business to someone who will.
That's why I will never buy another Netgear product... Outsourced tech support that knows less than the customer, after you muddle through the rough accent.
It is simple, we are first because we dropped the big bombs 2 times. That trickles down to the way we are viewed, just like how British pound is always higher then any othe currency, why ? Cause they used own almost the entire world at one point . These historical events are mirrors of how a country is precieved in the light of the rest of the world. Amercan economy might not be as strong right now, but since we are the only country to drop big bombs (Atom bombs) we will always be viewed as the leader of the world, and in that arrogance we will have a big fight on our hands soon. Russia had the bombs but they aren't committed to use them , like we are.First thing out of every americans mouth after 9/11 was "nukem"
I somehow doubt that it's the bomb but it might have a bit to do with the fact that america spend more cash on military than the rest of the world put together (yeah, they really do). But mostly it's a fashion thing, a 100 years ago was the time of the brits, 250 everyone loved france, before that spain was in fashion.
But the US economy has plunged in the Bush years, it's never a good idea to look for economical experts around your drinkin buddies. Things change, maybee china will come in fashion, or EU...
It's not only cash but things like music and movies, Hollywood is more important for how the world see us than nukes.
Yay! America-hatred! How original... whoever scribbled that picture should get an education from somewhere besides the "news" broadcasts and government schools... [...]
For english language version of games, the service centres will most likely be where the bulk of the english speaking population lives. That is, it will be somewhere in the USA /Canada area. The pricing in Australia seems extremely expensive compared to US prices. Someone in the supply chain is making a killing. As an example, I just did a quick comparison of Age of Conan prices:
EbGames US www.ebgames.com : $49.99 US EbGames Australia www.ebgames.com.au $79.95 AUD ($77.02 USD) On Tuesday 20 May my local Australian Ebgames outlet had the pre-order price as $99.99 AUD ($96.37 USD).
The Ebgames prices are competitive locally and typical of Australian stores.
what is Australia's job wages like ? It could be parallel to your cost of living ? Here in the U.S. the minimuim wage is like $7.15 an hour...
The economies of the USA and Australia are so different that you would need to be an economist to compare the cost of living. For example, we have higher taxes but this covers things like health care that USA citizens have to pay for separately. A straight comparison of minimum wage might be comparing apples to oranges.
However, the price of USA games sold here has increased from about $50 AUD to $100 AUD in the same period of time that the Australian dollar has almost doubled in value compared to the US dollar. The price of US games here should have almost halved.
A new release game selling for about $50 USD should be about $57 AUD (taking into account the currency conversion plus adding 10% gst). However, typical new release prices in Austalia are $99.99 AUD.
It would seem that someone in the supply chain is pocketing as profit the increased value of the Australian dollar compared to the the US dollar.
if the value of your dollar doubled milk+bread(basically your CPI) would be worth half as much. the price of your dollar doubled compared to the US dollar, so if you were paying the same you were last year you're still paying the same(yes that is ignoring the increases).
While I'm not deffinate on this I'd be willing to bet that your AoC CD's and your game CD's are printed+boxed in your own countries since it doesn't make sense to ship them when you can upload the data to the publisher for a few pennies. As such even if our dollar utterly crashes to being dimes on the dollar you'll still see the same prices.
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Woot for American brainwashing in convincing the world that we are the center of currency and that when the value of our currency goes down that the aggregate value of theirs goes up(which is doubly funny since we export but not enough to get that thought into your heads).
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
You have to think of the MMO world as a business. It costs lots of cash to maintain servers and the staff at locations. One of the reason why all the servers are in the US is because they are all US companies. As for pricing.. no idea. Maybe the weak dollar?
Yay! America-hatred! How original... whoever scribbled that picture should get an education from somewhere besides the "news" broadcasts and government schools...
America does not have the better mmo websites. Koreans and Japanese do. Case in point, go look at the NCSoft site, and flyff.jp. Then go look at the american versions. Even the Aion site looks like crap compared to the teaser site. >.>
Also, theres a lot of Korean and Japanese games that will never see outside those countries unless you want to play untranslated versions. Either because the developers dont want to send it out, or because theres supposedly no market.
Ooooook. So people should get educated from other venues than schools and the international news broadcasts? Because what can be worse than an education and noncommersial news! I am sorry, but the back of your Cornflakes package does not count as an education in the rest of the world. You proved that map a lot better than anyone else could
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force"
Well, I'd say the OP is mostly incorrect with one big exception.
As for Asia, much of the Asian market is far more developed in terms of online gaming than that of America. Comparing South Korea's online gaming segment to that of the US is like comparing the Empire State Building to Stonehenge. They're light years ahead of us in terms of broadband penetration, the diversity and sophistication of pricing models, the variety of games available to them, and the per capita usage of online gaming services. Pick any other indicator, and it's the same way.
Japan is a different story. The development of online gaming there has been rather slow. This is mostly because the Japanese gaming market is rather unique. It essentially has reached a point of saturation. It's not the case that online gaming can simply rely on new gamers to expand their user base. It has to compete with existing, entrenched forms of gaming. As for the rest of Asia, the localization of Japanese and Korean games is fairly widespread already, and we're starting to see parallel Asian launch as a norm for big western products. WoW did it very successfully, LotRO followed suit, and I doubt we're going to see any other big name title not do it from here on out.
Europe _was_ neglected for a long time, but now we're seeing parallel European launch as the norm for MMO's. The big problem for Europe was that Asian games had limited appeal, there were very few good European MMO studios, and American products rarely got implemented properly. Prior to WoW, the biggest MMO in Europe had 50k subs. Now that WoW has exploded out there with millions of subs, the potential of the market is proven, and everybody is taking notice.
Where are you right? Australia. I could pick apart any other region for you, but I really don't know how to explain this with any certainty for you guys, since I don't really have any solid answers based on decent research. Honestly, I never cared enough to look into it. I can give you an anecdotal response, though. If you want to find where along the supply chain prices are really rising, a good indicator is sometimes the gray market, and for you guys, I know the gaming gray market is pretty healthy and competitive with international pricing. The gray market is the first to respond to and pass along things like shipping costs, so I can tell you with some certainty that it's not really shipping that's getting you. So now we wonder if it's a local problem or if you're simply getting reamed by foreign publishers. What's a quick and dirty way to find that out? Well, the internet age has given us a decent indicator of that. We know that for every big publisher, the publisher's home office hold all the cards for AU digital distribution prices, and they always line up digital prices with their intended price points for a specific market, so lets look at Steam costs in AU. Ridiculous. Final verdict? It's probably 20% local price-gouging because of a small, spread-out market and 80% publisher price-gouging. The latter happens because publishers know the usual market force which might relieve this kind of bullshit, gray market importing of these goods, is underutilized in Australia for many reasons.
I don't really know where to send you if you're an Aussie. I know there are many import/export outfits in Hong Kong which deal specifically with gaming. I know they have competitive base prices, probably significantly lower than yours. But all the ones I know have their supply system optimized for sending stuff to North America, so they'd probably charge you prices that would end up the same as what you'd pay locally. I know there are a few gray market Australian gaming sites, too, but I can't help you out with specifics, as I never looked into them. Your best option might be to take shopping vacations every now and then. You get a markup on games, but your markup on other shit, especially certain kinds of electronic hardware, is far, far worse. So condense all such purchases into a window of a few days you spend flying into some Asian country.
Comments
Its probably because it takes too long to recode a game with the correct language for each region. Setizans expect that type of thing ....
To err is human....to play is divine
you will get the same in the UK really. just that they will try as hard as possible not to admit be the one that made the mistake ...and it takes a while to get results fro the stubborn bastards
It didn't take them long to admit they were in error... as soon as my cancelation crossed their desks, they were calling me begging me to reconsider. But what I considered was would I be sent to the same guy I talked to the first time everytime I have a problem with my service? No thanks, I don't need headaches ty. So yes, I turned down 2 years free service, and their apologies and they even went so far as to say that they had me as a " select customer" so that I would be guaranteed an american rep everytime I called in. But dealing with a company that would give that bad of customer service to anyone is not a company I care to deal with. See when i call customer service i expect them to be friendly and truely help resolve the problem, if they cannot do that then I take my business to someone who will.
still...does not explain why in general the US has better customer service...
maybe because they give the americans initial release to test the game out before releasing an actual polished game in Europe so europeans can enjoy it more? American GuineapigsmFor english language version of games, the service centres will most likely be where the bulk of the english speaking population lives. That is, it will be somewhere in the USA /Canada area.
The pricing in Australia seems extremely expensive compared to US prices. Someone in the supply chain is making a killing.
As an example, I just did a quick comparison of Age of Conan prices:
The Ebgames prices are competitive locally and typical of Australian stores.
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
.jpg)
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
.jpg)
It didn't take them long to admit they were in error... as soon as my cancelation crossed their desks, they were calling me begging me to reconsider. But what I considered was would I be sent to the same guy I talked to the first time everytime I have a problem with my service? No thanks, I don't need headaches ty. So yes, I turned down 2 years free service, and their apologies and they even went so far as to say that they had me as a " select customer" so that I would be guaranteed an american rep everytime I called in. But dealing with a company that would give that bad of customer service to anyone is not a company I care to deal with. See when i call customer service i expect them to be friendly and truely help resolve the problem, if they cannot do that then I take my business to someone who will.
That's why I will never buy another Netgear product... Outsourced tech support that knows less than the customer, after you muddle through the rough accent.
But the US economy has plunged in the Bush years, it's never a good idea to look for economical experts around your drinkin buddies. Things change, maybee china will come in fashion, or EU...
It's not only cash but things like music and movies, Hollywood is more important for how the world see us than nukes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANTDkfkoBaI
http://img141.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cnnczechmapzi0.jpg
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Senhores da Guerra
I mean, WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People do not realize that stupidity is causing:
(weeps)
what is Australia's job wages like ? It could be parallel to your cost of living ? Here in the U.S. the minimuim wage is like $7.15 an hour...
The economies of the USA and Australia are so different that you would need to be an economist to compare the cost of living. For example, we have higher taxes but this covers things like health care that USA citizens have to pay for separately. A straight comparison of minimum wage might be comparing apples to oranges.However, the price of USA games sold here has increased from about $50 AUD to $100 AUD in the same period of time that the Australian dollar has almost doubled in value compared to the US dollar. The price of US games here should have almost halved.
A new release game selling for about $50 USD should be about $57 AUD (taking into account the currency conversion plus adding 10% gst). However, typical new release prices in Austalia are $99.99 AUD.
It would seem that someone in the supply chain is pocketing as profit the increased value of the Australian dollar compared to the the US dollar.
if the value of your dollar doubled milk+bread(basically your CPI) would be worth half as much. the price of your dollar doubled compared to the US dollar, so if you were paying the same you were last year you're still paying the same(yes that is ignoring the increases).
While I'm not deffinate on this I'd be willing to bet that your AoC CD's and your game CD's are printed+boxed in your own countries since it doesn't make sense to ship them when you can upload the data to the publisher for a few pennies. As such even if our dollar utterly crashes to being dimes on the dollar you'll still see the same prices.
______________________________
Woot for American brainwashing in convincing the world that we are the center of currency and that when the value of our currency goes down that the aggregate value of theirs goes up(which is doubly funny since we export but not enough to get that thought into your heads).
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
You have to think of the MMO world as a business. It costs lots of cash to maintain servers and the staff at locations. One of the reason why all the servers are in the US is because they are all US companies. As for pricing.. no idea. Maybe the weak dollar?
America does not have the better mmo websites. Koreans and Japanese do. Case in point, go look at the NCSoft site, and flyff.jp. Then go look at the american versions. Even the Aion site looks like crap compared to the teaser site. >.>
Also, theres a lot of Korean and Japanese games that will never see outside those countries unless you want to play untranslated versions. Either because the developers dont want to send it out, or because theres supposedly no market.
Ooooook. So people should get educated from other venues than schools and the international news broadcasts? Because what can be worse than an education and noncommersial news! I am sorry, but the back of your Cornflakes package does not count as an education in the rest of the world. You proved that map a lot better than anyone else could
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
"Freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose" - Janis Joplin
.jpg)
Well, I'd say the OP is mostly incorrect with one big exception.
As for Asia, much of the Asian market is far more developed in terms of online gaming than that of America. Comparing South Korea's online gaming segment to that of the US is like comparing the Empire State Building to Stonehenge. They're light years ahead of us in terms of broadband penetration, the diversity and sophistication of pricing models, the variety of games available to them, and the per capita usage of online gaming services. Pick any other indicator, and it's the same way.
Japan is a different story. The development of online gaming there has been rather slow. This is mostly because the Japanese gaming market is rather unique. It essentially has reached a point of saturation. It's not the case that online gaming can simply rely on new gamers to expand their user base. It has to compete with existing, entrenched forms of gaming. As for the rest of Asia, the localization of Japanese and Korean games is fairly widespread already, and we're starting to see parallel Asian launch as a norm for big western products. WoW did it very successfully, LotRO followed suit, and I doubt we're going to see any other big name title not do it from here on out.
Europe _was_ neglected for a long time, but now we're seeing parallel European launch as the norm for MMO's. The big problem for Europe was that Asian games had limited appeal, there were very few good European MMO studios, and American products rarely got implemented properly. Prior to WoW, the biggest MMO in Europe had 50k subs. Now that WoW has exploded out there with millions of subs, the potential of the market is proven, and everybody is taking notice.
Where are you right? Australia. I could pick apart any other region for you, but I really don't know how to explain this with any certainty for you guys, since I don't really have any solid answers based on decent research. Honestly, I never cared enough to look into it. I can give you an anecdotal response, though. If you want to find where along the supply chain prices are really rising, a good indicator is sometimes the gray market, and for you guys, I know the gaming gray market is pretty healthy and competitive with international pricing. The gray market is the first to respond to and pass along things like shipping costs, so I can tell you with some certainty that it's not really shipping that's getting you. So now we wonder if it's a local problem or if you're simply getting reamed by foreign publishers. What's a quick and dirty way to find that out? Well, the internet age has given us a decent indicator of that. We know that for every big publisher, the publisher's home office hold all the cards for AU digital distribution prices, and they always line up digital prices with their intended price points for a specific market, so lets look at Steam costs in AU. Ridiculous. Final verdict? It's probably 20% local price-gouging because of a small, spread-out market and 80% publisher price-gouging. The latter happens because publishers know the usual market force which might relieve this kind of bullshit, gray market importing of these goods, is underutilized in Australia for many reasons.
I don't really know where to send you if you're an Aussie. I know there are many import/export outfits in Hong Kong which deal specifically with gaming. I know they have competitive base prices, probably significantly lower than yours. But all the ones I know have their supply system optimized for sending stuff to North America, so they'd probably charge you prices that would end up the same as what you'd pay locally. I know there are a few gray market Australian gaming sites, too, but I can't help you out with specifics, as I never looked into them. Your best option might be to take shopping vacations every now and then. You get a markup on games, but your markup on other shit, especially certain kinds of electronic hardware, is far, far worse. So condense all such purchases into a window of a few days you spend flying into some Asian country.