Where I Am

  I was talking to my old friend yesterday who lives in Australia. We were talking about a few things and as can happen the subject of videogames came up. He was looking to get a game, buying it purely digitally online via Steam. Because of where he lives he ends up being  charged almost 50% more than if I were to buy the very same game. We both pay no taxes on the purchase and the digital data we are given is exactly the same down to the last bit. So why, just because he is physically somewhere else, does it cost more for him.

  For physical goods I can see the need to charge slightly differently for some things. It can be harder to get that item to that place depending on where it is coming from and to. For digital goods though, assuming you don't take in to account the actual internet connection required, there is no difference regardless of where I am. Yet various forms of digital goods are restricted, priced differently and mostly just not available based on where the physical person actually is. Newer technology companies and forms of digital goods generally don't restrict like this. The older ones, TV, music, films etc, apply these arbitrary restrictions that don't make sense in the modern world and the sooner these older companies based around physical object business models realise this the sooner they can progress and actually make more money.

  The world of digital PC game sales has proved this over and over again. People will buy something, for a set price, the world over and for the vast majority of users not pirate it, even those games without DRM. Heck even the software I write is fully available for anyone in the world to download (except those of you in Iran, North Korea and other countries the US government has export restrictions on) you just need fairly specialised hardware to run it on.