Veterans Day Sale

boylermaker

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The thing with drugs is that they are (mostly) monopolies, at least in the United States. So if your company has the patent on Xenocibatab, nobody else can compete with you by selling Xenocibatab at a lower price. So we would expect that companies charge whatever the most they can get away with is in any given country. My guess would be that government-run health care systems in Europe are better able to set prices than occurs in the US, since they control more of the market share (and I think can just set prices by statute, no?). As long as your pill costs less than $100 to make, you might as well sell it in Italy for $100 if you don't have any other choice.

But, shipping isn't a monopoly. There are multiple shipping companies that compete with each other. I can ship to England via Fedex or via UPS or even via USPS. So we don't expect that companies set their prices at "whatever we can get away with", they have to price them at "whatever we can get away with without being so much more expensive than our competitors that nobody uses our product". That puts downward pressure on prices that should make them about equal in Europe and the US, assuming that supply and demand are equal.

Now, maybe I'm totally wrong about that, and shipping prices from Europe are set by government fiat in Europe, the same way drug prices are. I've never heard of that, but sure, why not? Of course, it begs the question of why European governments fix shipping-prices-from-Europe to be artificially low but not shipping-prices-to-Europe. Is it a form of cryptic tariff, perhaps? That's why I brought up the question.
 

Hardrada

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I think another reason oversees customer don't purchase directly is the risk/chance of getting hit with customs/VAT fees as well.
In fact there are 25% of customs taxes on games coming from the USA (instead of 0% before) + VAT fees now. A consequence of the Boeing/Airbus bone of contention.
 

klasmalmstrom

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In fact there are 25% of customs taxes on games coming from the USA (instead of 0% before) + VAT fees now. A consequence of the Boeing/Airbus bone of contention.
In Sweden, it has pretty much always been 25% VAT - assuming the package is "intercepted"- which does not happen all the time.
 

Robin Reeve

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In Switzerland it is CHF 17 for customs + 7% VAT (on the price + shipping costs).
$ and CHF are nearly at par.
I ordered for the Veteran's sale for 30$ games and the shipping was $65... so I asked to cancel it and MMP obliged (phew!).
For larger products - such as CdG - I found that some European retailers can cost more than when ordering directly from MMP...
Always compare.
 

echack

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Once someone has said that US Postal has screwed up investments for pensions of its employees and has been forced to make the customers pay for this - but I am not sure about this.
...

von Marwitz
Not really. The USPS was, a number of years ago, required to do the same pension accounting and retiree benefits accounting as a private company. Their pension fund is in good shape, but the retiree medical benefits package is screwed up for a number of reasons which are hard to explain in a sentence or two (and it isn't the meme that was floating around that they have to prefund for 75 years).

The problem for MMP and other game companies, is that they eliminated surface shipping. As for drug prices, the US has a (sorta) free market. The government health plans overseas negotiate prices that are essentially marginal cost of production plus a small markup or they refuse to add the drug to their formulary. So the US ends up paying for the drug R&D costs for most of the world.
 
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