From what I've read, Stardock/Impulse has nothing to do with it. It's the publishers.

When publishers, throught their actions, continually insist on pushing their prospective customers (not consumers) to the warez scene, who can blame them (the customers) when they eventually download the game without buying it.

 

Cheers for the comment Bebi.

Stardock have everything do do with it - they could not allow it. Granted the publishers might ignore Impulse for a while but it feels to me like Stardock have thrown out the baby with the bath water. While attempting to make a platform that is open and accessible to all they've also introduced the capability for preventing that to happen in order to appeal to the big publishers.

It's the big publishers that need to come around - and now thanks to Stardock - they don't need to.

Not really sure what you mean about this being a new concept. Impulse (and Steam) provide exactly the same system as before - you can only buy the product in markets that have been specified by the developer or publisher which has the rights. We place no restrictions on where you can use it, just as you could buy a program in India and then bring it over to the USA and use it.

The typical reason for this in the PC market is that the exclusive rights to sell a program in a particular market have already been sold to another company. If the developers say "well, we can only give you the right to sell this product in X, because publisher Y has all the rights in Europe", we have to abide by that.

Okay, sounds great.. you're only allowed to sell the product in the US. I'm effectively trying to buy your product in the US. You are based in the US, and you charge me in US dollars, from your US website/service. For all intents and purposes you have just sold a product 'in the US'!? Which I am then downloading(importing) to Australia.

This raises issues that the current business model doesn't know how to deal with..  Current distribution models make sense for physical product (and even then you have to start asking whether or not region based distribution deals are inherently anti-competitive).. when it's all coming down the tubes - not so much

Of course those with the fincancial interest to prevent changes that would benefit the developers and the end consumers while minimising the role of the middle man (aka the publishers) will continue to enforce old methodologies on new process.

If I am able to order a PC game for example from RandomOnlineStore.com, and have it shipped to Australia. Why can I not also buy said PC game online? Because if the publishers had their way said RandomOnlineStore.com would not be allowed to ship internationally, thus protecting their artificial pricing.

Read any marketing book and it will tell you to charge 'What the market can stand'.. i.e milk it for all its worth, and different ways to do so, locking in distribution is one of them.

But thankyou for your comment GreenReaper, I enjoy that Impulse allows for community discussion and debate.

Region locking doesn't allow Microsoft to charge us yanks more for Windows. It allows them to actually sell a copy on occasion in less affluent areas of the world.

If Microsoft tries to sell a South African farmer a $300 operating system, the most they can expect is laughter. Digital media is nearly free to replicate, as opposed to the creation costs, which can be obscene. They can't sell it at 20 bucks and get very far, but if they can sell some of it at 20 bucks, that's still a profit on the individual sale. Microsoft even sells a more resource friendly version of XP and Vista outside of the post industrial nations so they can get customers out of those broke bastards using ten year old computers.

Some of the companies have really gone overboard with things, like trying to prevent the actual use of software based on region, but the concept exists to increase sales, not prices.

I can't speak for RandomOnlineStore, but we try to keep to the spirit of the agreements that we are presented with. As far as I know (I'm not in sales), we are only allowed to sell certain products to customers based in the US or Canada. (That said, if you used a US credit card with a US address there probably wouldn't have been a problem.)

You're right that it doesn't necessarily make much sense in certain cases, but consider things like localization . . . local publishers might not be willing to do a deal at all if they thought that half their market (the half who could read English) would be taken by overseas imports before they got to market.

As for anti-competitive agreements, what matters to most companies is how much you'll pay for the rights - capitalism all the way.

Additional there are some other obvious and not the primary reasons.

International Laws, Tax laws, etc, etc. Government's are looking for ways to enforce tax collection and mostly to get more of everyone's money.

Frankly, I think a big step for this would be some form of treaty to be arrived at but, sadly we know how long things take at both the UN and World Bank. Most likely we'll be flying around in space cars before they catch up with things.

Camarooni ...in Oz the ACCC determined that region coding of DVDs [specifically] was an 'unlawful' restriction of trade [as far as Australian consumers were concerned - that being their sphere of 'control']...and declared it legal to sell region-free DVD players in Australia.  Because they [obviously] have no control over what happens outside our shores [Australia] they are obliged to prohibit the importation of region-free Players into the country as that is against the policies of the exporting countries.  The solution was/is to allow the modification of locked Players once they are here to play 'region free'.

Doing it this way complies with International legislation AS WELL AS local [Australian] legislation.

We don't however live in a vacuum....a case in point was back in the days of VHS and Pal....and the original intent to distribute a film called 'A Clockwork Orange' in Australia [in Pal VHS].  Someone suddenly remembered that the UK was also Pal...and that Kubrick [then still alive] owned total distribution rights to the movie within the UK and had prohibited its release there [as Censors had wanted to cut it for cinema release]...and if it were released in Oz there'd be a flurry of trade/orders from OZ to send copies to the UK.  So, we never got to see it either [on Video]...till Kubrick turned up his toes.

Copyright and distribution rights are a fact of life....and whereever you are you are obliged to abide by dem rulez....

Punishing a good company like Stardock (who are doing their best to improve digital distribution) by not not supporting them does you less good than anything.  If Stardock as a publisher does well without restricting their games/apps and does well as a digital distributor the market is more likely to change in your favor.

Try not to shoot the good guys.  

'rant'

I have to say if what Camerooni has mentioned (that some programs on Impulse are for US-customers only) is true, that would really annoy the heck out of me.

I understand that some areas of the world have cheaper pricing and they have my full support, but I have absolutely no/zero/nill tolerance for differnces in prizing and availability whithin the industralized areas of the world (North-America, Western-Europe, Australia, Japan).

I live in Switzerland, which is known to be a so called "high-price" island. That is, we pay about 30 - 50% more for medication than our neighbouring countries, even though Roche and Novartis, two of the biggest pharma-companies of the world, are Swiss. This drives the cost of our health-care up to a point, where even the most basic health-care plan becomes unobtainable (it actually is compulsory to have basic health-care insurance) for most blue-collar workers.

There is of course a big difference in live-supporting medication and software, but it drives up my blood-pressure, whenever I want to buy software, just to find out that it is not available in Europe (and of course the distributor for Europe, if there is one, charges about twice the price than what I would pay directly), or that I have to pay more, just because I live in another country, especially for goods that are distributed digitally.

I can imagine that such business-practices also play into the hands of the "warez"-scene. If you can't get it legally in your country, or if you would have to pay much more for the same good (again; I am talking of price-differences between countries of about equal living-standards), then the incentive to get it by illegal means would certainly be increased.

At least chip-modding for DVD-Players is legal here. Otherwise I would not have been able to play my 60+ Region-code4 DVD's (which actually cost the same in both countries) from my time in Australia .

'end rant'

I should take this spot to say that not all this is directed at stardock Region locking in general is the issue here. I probably shouldn't have led in straight away with the Impulse example, but hell, these are the impulse community pages are they not?

I appreciate the work that Stardock does, and having tried Impulse, I've played around with the free trial of Mycolours and the Object Dock and am this close to buying the pack with Windowblinds etc in it because I like what it does. (My only thought now is that it better be the same price in USD for me, that it is in USD for the Americans otherwise I certainly won't be buying it - also.. can't buy Corel Suite.. don't advertise it to me.. rather wouldn't know it even existed on your service..)

Region locking is a major concern and it affects a lot of people in many different countries. Oh it's not a problem now because I can just buy from my local distributor who adds his middleman cost to the 'value' chain, for now.. But as things move progressively online, what justification is there that I should pay 2 to 3 times the price of something than those living in the US when our dollars are almost neck and neck. Especially if I'm buying something for all intents and purposes 'in the US' in 'US Dollars'.. Shipping costs for physical product, sure charge me more.. Handling costs, yeah go ahead if it wasn't all automated.. Not being a US citizen tax - no, I don't think so!

Let's put an example up here now.. Due to enforcement of regions on videogames (Smash Brothers Brawl specifically), and Nintendo's decision to release in the US and Japan and delay the European release for 'localisation'.. which granted is necessary - good to provide everyone the experience in their native (or nearest known) languages. Instead of holding all versions back and releasing them together Europeans have to wait it out. Europeans who are paying two to three times the US cost based on exchange rate (even after shipping costs etc - because lets face it, even the US games are being shipped from the same plants in Asia - so any shipping costs would be present in the US games as well). People could (and some did) import Brawl, at massive price savings thanks to a little device that would make the wii think it was coming from the right region. So they got the game effectively early and at a better price than those who 'follow the rules'.. but now they have a modchip in their consoles - and all these games are still coming out overseas first - but that involves delivery times etc.. oh why don't they just download the games from the net instead - afterall they're already half way there with the modchip itself. Nintendo has just opened their doorway to piracy.

Another example - Steam (or Impulse) puts Assassin's Creed up.. Ubisoft decides not to sell outside the US with their products. However people are wanting to play the game now.. instead of making $40 US, they've made an Aussie walk into a store to pick up a copy - $100 AUD.. which equates to something like $85-90 USD.. pretty standard australian retail prices.. infact NextGen console releases went up to $120 when they launched.. why.. oh the Aussie dollar was around fifty cents.. so lets double the us retail price of $59.. aussie dollar has shot dramatically up - yet still paying at least double the price.. people start to think that torrent they saw for Assassin's Creed is worth a double look now.. Even someone who buys games can't help but look at all the US news sites, finding out what's new, when it's out, and how much it is.. What? It's going to come out here later, cost twice as much, and everyone will have moved onto the next big thing by then.. stuff it - i'll just download it!

People buy their software and/or games. But if they constantly see they're getting the raw end of the stick it begins to raise questions. Why can't we buy this product? Why are they charging me more for it even though I'm paying for it in their currency? (See the Activision re-pricing of Call of Duty 4 on Steam, $88.50 USD for australians). If 30 dollars is good enough to charge Americans, why do you want 60 dollars from Australians or 75 dollars from Europeans?

It's similar to Steve Jobs suckering into people saying he had no choice. Of course he had a choice. The fact with itunes was that thanks to Fairplay it fueled iPod sales even more. The stat he used to try and make it look like very few ipoders used itunes was taken with very basic assumptions! Bad Steve!

The internet is supposed to be the freedom of information! Region locking isn't just limited to software! It is being implanted into everything!

Anyway, as I've been told. So far the only thing we can do to get around region locking is ask someone from the US to buy it and gift the software to us.

Yep. EU prices are a riot as well... New games average 60€ (93$).

Spore Creature Creator: 10$. Or 10€ (which is 15$). Digital Download.

You know I hadn't even considered that! You my good man are a genius Though - what happens when someone trys to gift an item to someone where that item isn't available? Does Steam prevent that? Would Impulse prevent that?

It's pretty clear that my take on the subject is that it shouldn't! Now to find someone that I trust in the US to test this theory out