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Steam: New Pricing Needed For Argentina and Turkey by November 20th
(steamcommunity.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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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.