It's tough being a gamer in South America. Up to the Xbox 360 generation, piracy was a no brainer. The first original video game I bought in my entire life was for the PS4. Back then the Brazilian...
It's tough being a gamer in South America. Up to the Xbox 360 generation, piracy was a no brainer. The first original video game I bought in my entire life was for the PS4. Back then the Brazilian Real was still worth something. Right now, I feel very fortunate for having being able to purchase an Xbox Series S. Games Pass and promotions are a godsend
There's a reason the PS2 remains very popular around here...
I feel for my Argentinian fellows, though. The situation over there is significantly worse, and have been for many years.
Perhaps the solution is to treat countries in this situation like a charity case: Price low enough that the taxes keep the game affordable for Argentinians (or other countries), and then restrict...
Perhaps the solution is to treat countries in this situation like a charity case: Price low enough that the taxes keep the game affordable for Argentinians (or other countries), and then restrict region switching like Steam currently does?
The majority of any games sales will likely be in the US, Europe, and other economies with a better ability to support these sorts of unnecessary expenses anyway. I'd say it could be just a cost of doing business to let the more prosperous countries that can bare the burden subsidize countries that can't bare the burden, even if we're only talking about entertainment.
Unless I'm mistaken, Argentinians are buying cheap games to sell cards, but what if they could just buy the games they wanted directly with economically scaled pricing?
Planet Money had a decent story on a related topic recently, the real-money transactions and conflicts of Venezuelans in Runescape. The article frames this as kids making money to buy games, but...
Argentinians are buying cheap games to sell cards, but what if they could just buy the games they wanted directly?
Planet Money had a decent story on a related topic recently, the real-money transactions and conflicts of Venezuelans in Runescape.
The article frames this as kids making money to buy games, but RMTs can just be a decent job when there is a large disparity in the incomes of the player base. It may be a kid wanting to subsidize his hobby but it can also be grannies in Venezuela trying to survive or gold farmers in China like my brother knew in his old WoW days that wanted an air-conditioned tech-adjacent occupation.
Since the goods are virtual ones and not just the ownership of the game it gets a lot trickier to region gate it. If a player in Argentina can interact with a player in the U.S. and the game has some sort of tradeable time-restricted resource you'll tend to have this sort of market of digital goods.
Some sort of wealth-based partitioning of regions might be a solution to that issue, but it's a pretty nasty one. You'd end up with friends unable to play with each other because they're in different countries, denial of access to a game because it isn't economically viable to have a server in a less wealthy region, and a bit more technical difficulty for the developers.
This is because developers don't want to add servers or don't see value in these regions, not strictly because South Americans or Africans spend less on a copy of the game (just an example, as...
You'd end up with friends unable to play with each other because they're in different countries,
This is because developers don't want to add servers or don't see value in these regions, not strictly because South Americans or Africans spend less on a copy of the game (just an example, as both continents typically may have fewer servers for a game). I think lowering the price for better market penetration would resolve this issue somewhat, actually, by opening access to your game in a new region. It would be worse, as already demonstrated, to charge Argentinians and Americans the same higher value for a game, when they should be scaled by the local economy.
The context of that was restricting what servers people could connect to by the country of purchase/origin as a way of preventing the sale of digital goods. If I'm understanding it (not a gamer),...
The context of that was restricting what servers people could connect to by the country of purchase/origin as a way of preventing the sale of digital goods.
If I'm understanding it (not a gamer), a digital good (Steam cards) is what's being sold. When you allow interaction or trading between countries that have a large gap in their wages it's pretty much unavoidable that someone making 100U/hour will be willing to pay some fraction of that for some digital good that would otherwise require a couple hours of them playing them game to get. That lets someone making 5U/hour treat acquiring and selling that digital good as a job.
I was just mentioning an undesirable approach that might be taken to try to prevent RMTs.
It's tough being a gamer in South America. Up to the Xbox 360 generation, piracy was a no brainer. The first original video game I bought in my entire life was for the PS4. Back then the Brazilian Real was still worth something. Right now, I feel very fortunate for having being able to purchase an Xbox Series S. Games Pass and promotions are a godsend
There's a reason the PS2 remains very popular around here...
I feel for my Argentinian fellows, though. The situation over there is significantly worse, and have been for many years.
This really puts into perspective the pocket change I make selling my own Steam cards.
Perhaps the solution is to treat countries in this situation like a charity case: Price low enough that the taxes keep the game affordable for Argentinians (or other countries), and then restrict region switching like Steam currently does?
The majority of any games sales will likely be in the US, Europe, and other economies with a better ability to support these sorts of unnecessary expenses anyway. I'd say it could be just a cost of doing business to let the more prosperous countries that can bare the burden subsidize countries that can't bare the burden, even if we're only talking about entertainment.
Unless I'm mistaken, Argentinians are buying cheap games to sell cards, but what if they could just buy the games they wanted directly with economically scaled pricing?
Planet Money had a decent story on a related topic recently, the real-money transactions and conflicts of Venezuelans in Runescape.
The article frames this as kids making money to buy games, but RMTs can just be a decent job when there is a large disparity in the incomes of the player base. It may be a kid wanting to subsidize his hobby but it can also be grannies in Venezuela trying to survive or gold farmers in China like my brother knew in his old WoW days that wanted an air-conditioned tech-adjacent occupation.
Since the goods are virtual ones and not just the ownership of the game it gets a lot trickier to region gate it. If a player in Argentina can interact with a player in the U.S. and the game has some sort of tradeable time-restricted resource you'll tend to have this sort of market of digital goods.
Some sort of wealth-based partitioning of regions might be a solution to that issue, but it's a pretty nasty one. You'd end up with friends unable to play with each other because they're in different countries, denial of access to a game because it isn't economically viable to have a server in a less wealthy region, and a bit more technical difficulty for the developers.
This is because developers don't want to add servers or don't see value in these regions, not strictly because South Americans or Africans spend less on a copy of the game (just an example, as both continents typically may have fewer servers for a game). I think lowering the price for better market penetration would resolve this issue somewhat, actually, by opening access to your game in a new region. It would be worse, as already demonstrated, to charge Argentinians and Americans the same higher value for a game, when they should be scaled by the local economy.
The context of that was restricting what servers people could connect to by the country of purchase/origin as a way of preventing the sale of digital goods.
If I'm understanding it (not a gamer), a digital good (Steam cards) is what's being sold. When you allow interaction or trading between countries that have a large gap in their wages it's pretty much unavoidable that someone making 100U/hour will be willing to pay some fraction of that for some digital good that would otherwise require a couple hours of them playing them game to get. That lets someone making 5U/hour treat acquiring and selling that digital good as a job.
I was just mentioning an undesirable approach that might be taken to try to prevent RMTs.