this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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May all regional pricing end. I do not want to subsidize development costs for third world nations.
I suspect you'll gladly accept their seriously undercharged labor though
I'd rather force companies to not use third world labor so they stop suppressing our salaries and pushing down investment in first world labor productivity.
Do you really think they're going to make more revenue by making the pricing more than they're willing/able to pay?
Because if publishers did, they wouldn't offer regional pricing.
Oh I think they are making more revenue by charging the first world more, but I also think they shouldn't be able to get away with it.
"Making more revenue with negligible cost of distribution" and "we're subsidizing poor countries" are not compatible.
Yeah they are.
The game is being sold to the third world only exist because the first world is paying as much money as they are.
It's literally a scheme to extract more money out of people. It should be illegal to prevent people from the ability to use things like VPNs to get those cheaper prices opening up the market and ensuring the prices actually match supply and demand.
No, they are not.
The fact that they're making more net money from those regions than they otherwise would, by definition, makes it literally impossible for you to be subsidizing them. The alternative is not listing in those regions, not lowering prices for you. There is no theoretical world where you get a cheaper price in developed countries without regional pricing in lower income regions.
The alternative is marginally lower prices for the first world and higher prices for the third world as the prices become global instead of a massive grift which charges you based on how much money you're able to spend.
No, there's not even a theoretical possibility for that to happen. Lower priced regions are lower priced because there aren't a meaningful number of people in those regions able to pay first world prices.
Lowering the global revenue by whatever small amount those regions bring doesn't somehow incentivize publishers to lower revenue further by lowering prices in the first world. It makes no sense to think it does.
Forcing global prices will mean that the revenue maximizing price for the first world will do down.
Publishers will not just ignore the global markets. They will just be forced to sell their games for actual value instead of "how much you can pay"
No, it won't. There's no point on the curve where low income regions have any possibility whatsoever of enough volume to affect it in any way. It's not a matter of "affording" anything, because adjusting to satisfy those regions is lower revenue than ignoring them.
It won't have a negligible impact on pricing. It will be literally zero.
Literally just open up a few games in steam DB. It's a smooth gradient of nations with differing prices. It would absolutely not be negligible.
I said it wouldn't be negligible. It would be literally zero.
The increased volume in lower income regions is massively less than the lowered revenue in the first world in every case. Regional pricing is "bonus" revenue from low income regions. It does not offset the first world in any way.
Wow. That's definitely a take.
I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that you aren't subsidizing anything. Lower regional pricing in developing nations has absolutely no effect on the price in developing nations for games. There is no subsidizing because there aren't any costs to subsidize.
Literally the entire development cost. Games don't appear for free. They are developed with the money you pay.
Regional pricing is basically saying that for some reason video games should cost more because you have more money to spend on them.
That's just asinine. Every other industry that tries it gets widely criticized for it. If you want to get more money out of people with more money, give them more stuff. Don't arbitrarily decide something costs more in one country than it doesn't another even though the distribution costs are identical and the development costs are identical between them.
Well... How do you think a price for a product is found in capitalism? You try to find the sweet spot between too cheap and too expensive. When you are cheap more people buy, if you are expensive less people buy. Therefore there is a sweet spot where you make the most money. This obviously is dependent on the people in the market and the money they have. Of course the game publisher can go to the poor people and say that they want 500 money for their stuff. But they don't have that, so they won't pay it because they literally can't.
Long story short, this is not subsidising, this is publishers extracting the most amount of money from that specific market. Its called capitalism. Love it or hate it.
And of course products cost different amount of money around the world. Every market is different.
It should be priced on supply and demand. It should be priced based on companies like steam having no ability to control which country someone purchases from and everyone on the first world just using a VPN to jump borders and fix the cheapest country available.
Basically we just been a regulation making it illegal for companies like steam to deny people access to regional pricing. Then they will be forced to find a price point that matches supply with demand, instead of fleecing the first world for more money
You are aware that digital goods do not have a supply in the traditional sense, right? I can buy 500000000 copies of your data and you still will have more of it. Its not possible to apply supply and demand to digital goods because we have unlimited amounts of them.
And btw what you are saying is quite similar to what I described. The price is found via establishing the amount of money in the market and the willingness to spend. That kinda is a way of looking at the possibility of demand.
But anyway. The key difference, probably, is looking at who is aiming for what. The companies are looking at extracting maximum value for them. You seem to dislike that.
They have a supply. It's based on their cost to produce.
With artificial region locks that shouldn't exist. Open markets are better, and the bigger the market the better it is.