The 360 in Australia, two years on

The 360 has been retailing in Australia for over two years now, and Screenplay thought it a good time to catch up with Xbox Product Marketing Manager Jeremy Hinton on a wide range of topics. The interview covers, the successes, such as Xbox Live, as well as the failures, such as the Red Ring and HD-DVD, of the 360 so far, as well as the retail pricing of games in Australia, television and movie downloads and briefly touching upon our R18+ (or lack of) classification issue.

I always think that parallel importation hurts the local industry because someone loses out somewhere. We want to support our retailers, ideally we really want our customers to be purchasing from local retailers and supporting our business as well. I think right now the numbers are relatively small, but that doesn't mean that they may not increase very rapidly. But at the same time, consumers are certainly well within their rights to do so. If they are able to find a better deal and its going to work on their system, they are absolutely within their rights to do that. The exchange rate issue is one that is sometimes difficult to manage working for a company like this, it goes in swings and roundabouts. There are times when our exchange rate is terrible yet we maintain our pricing. And there are times, like the recent swing, where it's been great and we need to scramble to bring our prices a little bit closer to where they need to be.