Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Adobe Bows To Pressure and Cuts Australian Prices

Posted by timothy on from the fairish-dinkum dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Adobe has bowed to public pressure and slashed the price of some of its products for Australian customers a day after being ordered to front a parliamentary committee hearing to explain its excessive charges."

4 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. About time! by Gumbercules!! · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's ridiculously expensive to buy software in Australia. Most of it is purely digital and there's no justification. I hope the other vendors follow suite, soon. Overseas readers may not be aware that it's cheaper to fly TWO people to America and buy Visual Studio there, then fly back here, than it is to buy it here (link here if you think I'm exaggerating: http://theconversation.edu.au/cheaper-hardware-software-and-digital-downloads-heres-how-8382). That's just an example (I know Visual Studio is not exactly top pick on Slashdot but it's still got its place).

    It's much cheaper to buy games on Steam through a proxy - as in about 50% cheaper. It's just completely unfair and I'm glad someone is finally doing something about it.

    1. Re:About time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      You can legally get a refund for a game that does not work. You can legally sell your games. You can legally sell your account. All of these things are impossible in America.

    2. Re:About time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      >Apple does it with iTunes, Steam does it with games.

      I think you're trying to say "Valve does it with Steam", and even in that case, you're not right. Valve leaves the pricing on Steam up to the publishers, as long as they get their 30% cut. Valve's own games on Steam are pretty cheap.

      The publishers, in turn, say they have to rip off Aussies because they have legally binding contracts with brick-and-mortar stores (e.g. EB games) promising not to undercut them. If they went against that, they'd likely find all their physical discs dumped in the sea. For now, they still make most of their money from physical disc sales. What they'd really like to do is reduce the price by a fraction and sell vastly more copies to Australians, and they can't do that until the contracts expire or physical sales become irrelevant. At the moment, their main loss is savvy Aussies importing legitimate physical copies of the game from the UK for less than it costs to buy it in the shops.

  2. Re:About darn time by VortexCortex · · Score: 3, Informative

    The "smart autofill" function is effectively magic; that wasn't added in until at least 2010. If you were hanging out on CS1 or CS2 that would be an easy incentive to upgrade.

    Or just use GIMP, which already had that feature.

    Magic? FYI: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from FLOSS.