You’re Doing it Wrong: Oh mon Jeux

I’ve been in France this week on a little holiday. Being a gamer I felt it my duty to browse several videogame stores and shops selling videogames to see the games on offer. Being very frugal too I also felt it my duty to compare prices and see whether the French were getting games cheaper or more expensive than the English and maybe discover a good deal in the process. I was expecting to find that videogames would be a little bit pricier due to the cost of other goods in France compared to England and the strength of the currency. What I didn’t expect to find was the cost of games to be so high.

The UK’s form of currency is the pound sterling, more commonly known as [British] pounds. A videogame in the UK will have a retail price of about 40 pounds, give or take five pounds depending on the game or publisher’s greed. Stores will knock down a recommended retail price as they see fit but a new release will normally see just a few pounds dropped in price.

France is one of 16 countries in the European Union to have adopted the Euro (the symbol being €), and prices have to be adjusted accordingly. I reckoned a new release videogame that had a £40 RRP in the UK would retail at €45, possibly €50. In actuality, the cost is €65-70. With the current exchange rate, €70 is worth just over £58 which is a whole £18 more than the UK. I would like to know why this is.

Game Group plc exist in both the UK and France, so I was able to compare the costs of games in a GAME store and on their website to see what the cost difference is. Call of Duty: Black Ops will cost you €66,49 to pre-order online in France with free shipping; it costs £44.99 to pre-order in the UK with free shipping also. At €66,49 it works out to be £55.34 currently, which means it costs a French citizen over £10 more to buy Black Ops than a UK citizen. Continuing the Call of Duty trend Modern Warfare 2 in-store cost €54,99 on sale, which works out at £45.77. Even with a €15 reduction in price, the cost of Modern Warfare 2 in France is still more than the RRP of the game in the UK. StarCraft II, a PC-only game retails at €56,99 online, whereas in the UK it retails at £34.99.

I can’t use just GAME as the basis for my research; visiting a shop called Micromania I was met with slightly lower prices but slightly lower in comparison to the French GAME. The cost of a used Nintendo DS Lite was €149,99 in Micromania; you would expect to find a used DS Lite in-store at somewhere like Gamestation for less than £90. Used games rather than used consoles have a far smaller price gap between them, although in one store I noticed a promotion where games like Bioshock 2 pre-owned were on offer for €25 each.

The price difference is noticeable as the cost gets higher: I was staggered to find the PlayStation 3 Slim with Heavy Rain bundle retailing for €349,99 in GAME when it would retail for no more than £250 in the UK. Even one-off shops akin to Cash Converter in the UK were selling consoles like the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 for far more than expected. I’d rather not pay more than £100 for the first Nintendo DS, thanks.

So what’s the reason for the high pricing? I honestly don’t know. It may be import costs but that wouldn’t justify such stark differences in price. I’d chalk it up to the location more than anything: things like food, clothes, films, music, etc. cost more in France than the UK. I went to see Inception (again) while in France with my friends who had yet to see it and it cost €9,70 for a single ticket. Things seem to be more expensive in general, videogames are just more noticeably expensive.

On the French GAME website, their motto is “Jouez moins cher”, which translates as “Play for less”. Je ne crois pas!