Being an Aussie Gamer Sucks

I have lived in Australia all my life so far and in recent years I have seriously been considering leaving, permanently.   Why? because I am sick and tired of being treated so damn poorly by our government in regards to being part of the modern age.

Let me list off some things that are still pissing me off about living here;

Number 1 – Download Caps

We have absurd internet download caps.  Mine is maxed out, yes maxed out at twenty gigabytes during regular hours and forty gigabytes during off peak hours. It is the most expensive plan available at a staggering eighty dollars per month.  That’s around thirty seven U.S depending on the current exchange rate.   

Since I almost never use the off peak for anything but downloading big files as I sleep that essentially leaves me a measly twenty for the times of day during each month that I am actually using the internet proper.

So for all you American folks out there, or hell anyone living in a country with either no caps or vastly larger caps who is all excited about the oncoming age of ‘digital distribution’ please keep in mind how utterly skrewed people like us Australians are when it comes to downloading content.  I watched a couple of series of an Anime I like this month all in low-res streaming video and my download cap was reached within two weeks.

For three months in a row now I have hit my download cap around two weeks before the end of the month due to my relatively average digital lifestyle.  When that cap is reached the internet is essentially unusable because they drop your speed to such a low number you might as well not bother.  A hundred megabyte podcast for example took me over three hours to download.  

If all gaming goes digital only and we’re still stuck with these absurd caps I wont be able to play more than two thirds of a typical months releases.

I love the convenience of buying my games via Steam but until our internet system gets improved I am utterly terrified of my future with gaming, especially since games are also getting much bigger.  The PSPGo will sell horribly here because of this, it is a guarantee.

Our prime minister did announce a couple of months ago a several billion dollar plan to update our telecommunications infrastructure but we have yet to see or hear any concrete details on when or what exactly this will lead to happening, my guess is it will still be years until we are anywhere near to having the kind of network most other developed nations already have.  And even when we get this upgrade if the caps remain in place its wasted money.

Number 2 – Pricing

In America a typical new console title costs sixty dollars, I still get frustrated whenever I hear people complain about this. One hundred and twenty dollars is a standard price for a new console game here. If you are lucky you sometimes find a game for only ninety.  Of course games go down in price the older they are, that doesn’t change the fact when it comes to most new games I can only buy two a month if that.

Of course gaming is an expensive hobby by nature, its simply much more expensive here.

Then their are the consoles themselves, the Playstation 3 started at one thousand dollars when it launched here and is still selling for around seven hundred. Thank god the slim is finally coming out along with a price cut soon.

Number 3 – We Have No Adult-Only Rating for Games

For films and television we have an R rating here in Australia, this rating means legally you must be eighteen years old to purchase whatever content you wish to view under this rating.

Yet their is not one for games, why? I wish I had an answer, the people in charge of this idiotic system of ours sure don’t.  We have G for general, T for teen, M for mature and MA for 15+ restricted yet no adult only rating whatsoever.

This can mean two things;

1.  Any game deemed ‘too intense’ for MA is either banned outright or heavily edited and severely delayed. Dark Sector, Silent Hill: Origins are a couple that this happened too.
Fallout 3 was almost banned entirely because of its supposed realistic depictions of drug usage.  

2. Any game that should be edited is sometimes for some reason not and is instead labeled MA and thus any younger gamer could end up buying it because almost all moms think that their children are safe to buy and play any MA game as soon as they get close to puberty.     The department in charge of rating games in Australia claims that their is no R rating because it would allow games unsuitable for children to enter the country.

You read that right, that’s how utterly stupid they are.

Not only do they think most people who play video games are still children (despite the fact it has been proven the average age is closer to mid thirties now) they think that by letting games that should be labaled adult only be released as MA with or without minor edits and subsequently given a higher chance of getting in to the hands of children is some how… better.

Fear 2, Gears of War 2, Condemned 2, GTA4; all recent games that should not be sold to minors yet it is a certainty that because of our ratings system children across the country have bought and played these games. 

The major problem isn’t just that we dont have the rating in the first place but that most parents aren’t even aware of this fact.

Even when several people tried to speak directly with our government about the issue on multiple occassions they practically ignored us.  Thousands of Australians were surveyed in one instance and over nintey percent said we needed an R rating but nothing ever came from that. The issue is still ‘under discussion’ or some such nonsense they claim.

Diablo 3 may very well be the next big title to fall victim to our idiotic and severely out dated ratings system as Blizzard devs have gone on record to say they may need to edit its violence for countries like ours. 

Aside from my above gripes, I do love living here in all other facits of my life but with gaming and the internet becoming an increasingly larger part of my day to day activities I wonder if their will come a time where I simply can not function under these conditions.

I get nintey percent of my entertainment from the internet, I run my own website, interact with friends via it more than any other method and even my non gaming related hobbies/past times are directly related to the internet as I am a digital artist and a digital writer.

Between the end of this year and sometime in to next I may very well have made the decision to move to a country(most likely America since I have several friends there) where living the way I do is a vastly easier less irritating experience.  I love my gaming and my digital lifestyle that much that I would go to that extreme and I’m willing to bet many Aussie gamers have thought about doing the same.