I love Steam regional pricing now.
I love Steam regional pricing now.
https://steamdb.info/app/2161700/
Why is the game more expensive in Kazakhstan than in Norway? Why is it 25% cheaper in Singapore? Why is Brazil more expensive than Japan? Why is Pakistan/South Asia the same price as the U.S?
Atleast before, Turks and Argentine people got the cheapest price (and that made sense with hyperinflation and low purchasing power) but now they nerfed that shit.
Idk, but I'm going to turn on my VPN and connect to Vietnam so I can pay WITH MY DONG!!!
Remember folks, if your Dong remains inflated for more than 6 hours consult a medical professional.
great idea, but do it now before inflation ruins your dong
Easier to pirate tbh
I think they have tricks to detect this unless you're willing to get a credit card with a foreign address.
Wise card my friend, instant conversions!..
Who am I kidding, I pirate the shit out of games lol!
Lmao, that game costs around 25% of Brazil's minimum monthly wage (R$1412), and a little over 10% of the average monthly wage (R$2924, according to a quick google search). And that doesn't take into account how expensive a gaming PC or console would be. An RTX 3060 costs around R$2000. I'm still rocking a GTX 1080, stretching it to its limits.
I've only bought two games over the past five years: Elden Ring and RDR2. I paid R$250 and R$200 for them, respectively. Everything else I either buy when I see a crazy discount, or I just pirate it.
It's hard to understate how fucking expensive everything is in Brazil, for someone who lives here and earns the local currency.
I mostly buy games by selling crates that I get in counter strike. It's just not worth it otherwise
I think the answer is that the actual calculus is 'how much is this market-demographic willing to pay for our game'. Which is something that developers have to do on their own with multiple concerns in mind.
Some indie devs quickly turn countries like Brazil from their largest piracy market to their largest actual market just by giving them a bigger discount. Other devs don't have to care about that sort of thing, and assume that their niche / mainstream product will be bought regardless and that the gains from further discounts do not outweigh the discount themselves.
Hyperinflation accelerates the latter logic. Whatever turkish people or argentineans have the money to buy games at this point will pay the full exchange rate - or get an EU/US friend to buy the game for them. Especially if multiplayer. With the full erosion of purchasing power in a country your market shrinks to that country's elite. And the well connected few.
Some indie devs quickly turn countries like Brazil from their largest piracy market to their largest actual market just by giving them a bigger discount.
Russia is another great example of that. Steam prices were historically very low due to ubiquitous software piracy. It was so widespread that even large computer stores would sell pirated games. AAA game publishers had to put their games on Steam with region locking at up to 10x discounts for people to actually buy them. Then prices steadily creeped up as more and more people started to purchase games
Whatever turkish people or argentineans have the money or connections to buy games at this point will pay the full exchange rate
Speak for yourself mate, I miss my 10yo tripleA games for a 1/400 th of my salary
And I mean it fuck dammit, 500 USdollars is a GOOD salary here
I miss my 10yo tripleA games for a 1/400 th of my salary
thats the problem innit, we live off our labor. i shouldn't have picked hard mode
I remember vividly this rich family talking about how they could buy whatever version of Playstation was out back in the early 2010s. Meaning that they paid the full speculative price of thousands of dollars.
It's a big world out there and games only sell a few million globally.
Going by the cost of a new game in the US, the standard should be "median cost of three large pizzas with tax from non-chain pizzeria".
Vietnamese WHAT!?!?!
1.2 million of them
CIS - U.S. Dollar
No thanks, i will instead choose the more civilized approach, and crack my games like I’ve always done
I used one of those hacks where you could get three years of Xbox Game Pass for less than 100 USD. Once that runs out for me in 2025 I'm probably gonna be done with gaming for good except for whatever games I can pirate on my dilapidated laptop.
Not even so much about piracy if you're only playing on a laptop. At that point you'll want to look into all the good actually free games out there that run on toasters. Dwarf Fortress is my highest recommendation in that category, but there are a lot of em
Probably wine + nosteam torrents will have leveled up again by then.
i made like 5 different microsoft accs to abuse their first 3 months for a buck bullshit back when they still had it
It's the same for the new Like a Dragon game. I assume they're trying to thwart people like me who use a VPN to buy games for cheaper.
I ended up buying a shared steam account via eBay for $12. Sellers buy the game and sell offline access to multiple people. You get login details, install the game and then put steam in offline mode and keep access to the game.
that seems like a lot of trouble compared to piracy
Denuvo :(
It's not likely to be cracked, unfortunately. It has the latest denuvo and nobody has been able to crack it. Even previous denuvo versions were only able to be cracked by one person.
It's the same for the new Like a Dragon game. I assume they're trying to thwart people like me who use a VPN to buy games for cheaper.
yea that argument never made sense to me. lets say someone in the first world who is really frugal decided to use a vpn to buy region locked games, thats still extra money in the pockets of the corp since distribution costs of the game is low. they are unlikely to have purchased the game otherwise in which case the corp gets $0. the labor/capital required is already spent, the workers have to be paid regardless of whether the game sells or not.
I feel like I’ve been left in the past with that Yen to USD conversion, like I swear back in 2009 when I lived there it was 1 dollar to 100 yen or even in the 90s. Then again game prices in Japan were always absurd at like 10k for a new AAA title.
Minimum wage in Turkey recently increased to 17.000 lira per month, equal to 570 dollars. Starvation line is 15.000 liras per month for a four-person family in Ankara, poverty line for the same situation is 49.000 liras.(source) Tl;dr nobody gonna buy this. Even my friends who like to buy from Steam started to pirate more and more.
