“Price discrimination requires market segmentation and some means to discourage discount customers from becoming resellers and, by extension, competitors.” Do you know what segmentation is? I suggest you look it up.

Here's a better link for you:

“What is price discrimination?

Price discrimination or yield management occurs when a firm charges a different price to different groups of consumers for an identical good or service, for reasons not associated with costs.”

http://tutor2u.net/economics/revision-notes/a2-…

Got that? “different groups of consumers, e.g. people in US and people in China.

So what we have is a “global economy” with “market segmentation” in fhe form of “regional markets”. But, don't worry about it, everyone makes mistakes.

I'm so done with this.

I also seriously question the meaningfulness of 'consumer attitudes' particularly as it pertains to games like Call of Duty, which seem to draw audiences who love being treated poorly (why else would they be paying for Modern Warfare?), as the collapse of the 'boycott' indicates.

Price discrimination exists when sales of identical goods or services are transacted at different prices from the same provider. In a theoretical market with perfect information, no transaction costs or prohibition on secondary exchange (or re-selling) to prevent arbitrage, price discrimination can only be a feature of monopolistic and oligopolistic markets[1], where market power can be exercised. Otherwise, the moment the seller tries to sell the same good at different prices, the buyer at the lower price can arbitrage by selling to the consumer buying at the higher price but with a tiny discount. However, product heterogeneity, market frictions or high fixed costs (which make marginal-cost pricing unsustainable in the long run) can allow for some degree of differential pricing to different consumers, even in fully competitive retail or industrial markets. Price discrimination also occurs when the same price is charged to customers which have different supply costs.

The effects of price discrimination on social efficiency are unclear; typically such behavior leads to lower prices for some consumers and higher prices for others. Output can be expanded when price discrimination is very efficient, but output can also decline when discrimination is more effective at extracting surplus from high-valued users than expanding sales to low valued users. Even if output remains constant, price discrimination can reduce efficiency by misallocating output among consumers.

Price discrimination requires market segmentation and some means to discourage discount customers from becoming resellers and, by extension, competitors. This usually entails using one or more means of preventing any resale, keeping the different price groups separate, making price comparisons difficult, or restricting pricing information. The boundary set up by the marketer to keep segments separate are referred to as a rate fence. Price discrimination is thus very common in services, where resale is not possible; an example is student discounts at museums.

Price discrimination can also be seen where the requirement that goods be identical is relaxed. For example, so-called “premium products” (including relatively simple products, such as cappuccino compared to regular coffee) have a price differential that is not explained by the cost of production. Some economists have argued that this is a form of price discrimination exercised by providing a means for consumers to reveal their willingness to pay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

There is plenty of other information available.

And your feelings about consumer attitudes are meaningless to market forces whereas consumer attitudes are not.

In fact, why don't you research the prevalence of this phenomenon yourself? This practice is why you can now buy CD keys for all kinds of games at prices far below what you'd normally pay for the full game if you were to buy it fairly at the correct price- the CD keys are in turn bought from local distributors in less prosperous economies and the savings are passed on to you, the obscenely rich western cheapskate who will absolutely not tolerate the fact that some Chinese is getting a sweet deal on a freaking video game.

And for the record I could also not care any less how furious customers are over the practice, it's perfectly legitimate for companies to sell games at a price commensurate with the local economic conditions. If they were selling it at prices $20 different at locations a mile apart in the same country, those customers have a point. But it's absurd to claim that you can or should sell the same game for the same price everywhere on earth, and therefore that everyone has the same amount of disposable income, access to the requisite technology, etc. It is, again, not at all 'discrimination,' not in the technical sense or the colloquial.