at $79.95 is essentially equivalent to selling at cost price. Is it the publisher? Well, common sense would suggest that if the retailers aren't scooping the cream then the distributor must be raking it in from the extra dollars consumers pay in stores. But during off the record conversations with people in the games industry, we've been informed that Australia is far from the highest performing region when it comes to profit. It begs the question: where is all this money going? Michael Ephraim is the one industry figure who has been most outspoken regarding the issue, but even he won't get into specifics. "From a business perspective, there is a lot of complexity involved," claims Ephraim, "from very volatile exchange rates, to taxes and duties, distribution and transit costs, marketing and operational costs, size of market and so on. We try to be as comparable as possible within these parameters." According to Dr Mark Melatos, there may be veracity to that claim; higher operational costs in Australia may be part of a rolling set of circumstances that result in more expensive videogames. "The other side of the coin," begins Mark, "is that local vendors may face higher operational costs -- higher wages to staff, and higher business taxes." These extra costs may still not be enough to explain the huge disparity in pricing. "My gut feeling however," says Mark, "is that these issues are unlikely to explain much of the price difference." Taking Stock None of this really explains