I don’t think ti’s a big problem at all. Publishers and developers are still making money, and the “solutions” to the problem are worse than the actual problem.
Does anyone have pics of retail box pricing in Russia?
here, but not “fresh” Welcome to Russia, Where Most of Your Friends Are Video Game Pirates
Wouldn’t making game keys region/country locked depending on the region/country they were sold largely solve the problem?
If you ignore completely the existence of the myriad ways people get around such things, sure.
In the end, such “features” typically only inconvenience regular customers. Not to mention that any time spent doing that is time not spent making a better game that will sell more copies. DRM is a failing proposition that mostly exist to make executives at large publishing companies feel good, rather than serve any useful purpose. They certainly don’t save anyone money.
For indies it’s not only worthless but actively counterproductive. The biggest hurdle as an indie is to get people to play or notice your game at all.
In addition to this, if you’re selling digitally, there’s absolutely no reason to charge customers higher prices based on region, or (and I’ve actually seen EA do this TO ME) charge local taxes on top of USD prices. You don’t remit Canadian taxes to the IRS so why are charging HST on top of a price in USD? Not to mention that Steam doesn’t even charge tax here, despite prices being about $10-15 more expensive across the board than America (gee, I wonder where the $10 “box charge” went… oh right, here.). Don’t use rate of exchange too liberally on digital products, otherwise people outside the US will buy less product from you.
Yea but you can’t make games cost 5 dollars everywhere like they do in russia now can you?
Did you actually read and take in that post you’ve quoted? I said “the price of goods should really reflect the cost of developing / manufacturing them, regardless of the region.” - The point is, you really can’t sell it for $5 to one set of people, but $130 to another set of people, and complain that people are using grey markets to obtain the cheaper keys; it’s retarded, since you created that problem yourself. More uniform pricing across regions would eliminate that entirely.
But more uniform pricing across regions only work if you have more uniform income across all regions. When the difference of income between countries is so incredibly high you can’t make a more uniform pricing scheme that actually works.
I do agree that INCREASING the base price in countries like australia is very asinine but it’s a delicate situation and it’s not something that’s easy to fix.
You realise that the regional pricing of videogames isn’t directly related to income? This is pretty clear from the outset; those in the US generally have more disposable income than those in the UK, Eurozone, Aus or NZ, but their games are much cheaper. IGN Australia did some quick research a couple of years back and found that games in the UK cost 170% of the US price, and Australia had it bad at 240%.
Compare that with this handy chart I generated over on the OECD data site (Household accounts - Household disposable income - OECD Data):
Disposable income and game prices just don’t line up, and it’s not always across the board sometimes it’s just one or two regions getting shafted. On Steam as an example which was brought to my attention recently, Civ 5 is $30 in the US, £20 ($30) in the UK, E30 ($35) in Europe, but just R500 ($7) in Russia compared to $70 in Aus / NZ ($52). I’m not surprised a Kiwi friend used a $25 grey market key when it’s literally half the price. If we were following disposable income charts, the prices should have been $30 in the US, $20 in the UK, $24 in Aus and $15 in Russia.
The real reason prices are so artificially low in Russia, is an attempt to combat the absurd levels of piracy (other poor countries like Turkey or those in the Balkans get the Eurozone prices) - but this is as much a cultural problem as it is a financial one; many Russians simply do not want to pay for games, so they won’t. If you’re going to try and pander to these people by creating absurdly low prices for them, you can’t complain about the grey market it creates in other regions as a result of people exploiting such massive price differences.
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